I decided to run some benchmarks of my AMQP encoder/decoder (AMQ Protocol gem) against the old one in the AMQP gem to see whether it performs better or not. So far I did only the most basic optimisations like storing reusable values in constants, nothing special (yet).

I did two sets of benchmarks: CPU time benchmarking using my fork of RBench with support for custom formatters (like writing results into a YAML file) and memory benchmarking using Object.count_objects (Ruby 1.9).

I’m happy to announce that the AMQP 0.7 is released, as I promised in the previous blog post. So what are the changes?

In the past year development of the AMQP gem was practicaly stagnating, as its original author Aman Gupta (@tmm1) was busy. A lot of bugs stayed unresolved, the code was getting old and out-dated and no new features or documentation were made.

At this point I started to talk with the RabbitMQ guys about possible collaboration on this. Actually originally I contacted VMware when I saw Ezra Zygmuntowicz looking for people to his cloud team, but when I found that VMware recently acquired the RabbitMQ project in London, I got interested. I signed the contract, switched from script/console to Wireshark and the RabbitMQ Tracer and since November I’ve been happily hacking on the AMQP and AMQ-Protocol gems.