Today Phusion has announced the release of Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) 1.8.7 (more specifically, 1.8.7-20090928). Once considered a bit of a joke, given the name, REE has proven itself to be anything but, with significant memory usage and speed improvements over the stock “MRI” Ruby implementation (achieved by way of patches to the MRI code). The key development with this release is compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, rather than the 1.8.6 of previous versions.
While REE has shown itself to be a good performer compared to the unpatched MRI implementation before, this week Evan Weaver of Twitter revealed how a release candidate version of REE 1.8.7 has resulted in a significant throughput increase on the same codebase. Read More