Upgrade to rest-client >= 1.7.1 slows writes to Fedora by over 30%

[acurley]

N.B. Unfortunately I don't have an answer yet to this issue and cannot make a pull rquest but felt to add it should others experience the same problem. When a solution is authored, either in this gem or rest-client, I'll be sure to link to this issue

I recently ran bundle update on my application and among the various gems that updated was rest-client, which upgraded from 1.6.8 to 1.7.1 and was released three days ago. rest-client is a dependency of rubydora whose .gemspec file does not put a limitation on the version of rest-client. I noticed a significant performance decrease when running my specs and successfully isolated the cause to rest-client.

Below is my git diff on Gemfile.lock and some time trials to prove problem. I even tried creating objects both with and without updates to Solr to ensure that the problem was with the write speed to Fedora. I create 10 AcquisitionProject objects (an ActiveFedora object) using FactoryGirl in four circumstances and use Ruby#Benchmark to give time results.

[10:25:15 curley@server:/opt/apps/andrew/ike] $ git diff Gemfile.lock
diff --git a/Gemfile.lock b/Gemfile.lock
index cda372b..c696b6a 100644
--- a/Gemfile.lock
+++ b/Gemfile.lock
@@ -220,6 +220,7 @@ GEM
     multi_json (1.10.1)
     net-http-persistent (1.9)
     net-ldap (0.5.1)
+    netrc (0.7.7)
     nokogiri (1.6.2.1)
       mini_portile (= 0.6.0)
     nom-xml (0.5.1)
@@ -309,12 +310,10 @@ GEM
       rdf (~> 1.1, >= 1.1.4)
     rdf-xsd (1.1.1)
       rdf (~> 1.1)
-    rdoc (4.1.1)
-      json (~> 1.4)
     ref (1.0.5)
-    rest-client (1.6.8)
-      mime-types (~> 1.16)
-      rdoc (>= 2.4.2)
+    rest-client (1.7.1)
+      mime-types (>= 1.16, < 3.0)
+      netrc (~> 0.7)
     rolify (3.4.0)
     rsolr (1.0.10)
       builder (>= 2.1.2)

Under rest-client 1.6.8

irb(main):001:0> ENABLE_SOLR_UPDATES=false
=> false
irb(main):002:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 3.20260709
irb(main):003:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 2.818982106
irb(main):004:0> ENABLE_SOLR_UPDATES=true
=> true
irb(main):005:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 2.905722773
irb(main):006:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 2.967691368

Under rest-client 1.7.1

irb(main):006:0> ENABLE_SOLR_UPDATES=false
=> false
irb(main):007:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 3.989939417
irb(main):008:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 3.729743344
irb(main):009:0> ENABLE_SOLR_UPDATES=true
=> true
irb(main):010:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 3.913787696
irb(main):012:0> Benchmark.realtime { 10.times { FactoryGirl.create(:base_acquisition_project) }}
=> 3.761060276

I can find nothing on the rest-client issue tracker about others experiencing the same kind of slowness so perhaps the problem is somewhere in rubydora and it's use of the RestClient class.

[acurley]

It strikes me that the obvious answer is to amend the .gemspec file to rest-client 1.6.8 but that seems premature and doesn't solve the problem. But if that is the consensus, I'll be glad to submit the pull request.