Idle Hacking

It’s been nearly 8 months, since I decided to add multi interface support to curb.  Now we have a new release on rubyforge (0.3.1)

The major changes includes:

• Add multi interface support
• Avoid blocking other ruby threads while in a easy perform
• Add support for HTTP DELETE Requests
• Add basic support for HTTP PUT Requests (not from a file)
• Ruby 1.9.1 Support
• Upgraded packaging and dependencies for build and package
• Upgraded test harness to run stressing the libcurl http code base
• Incorporated 8 months of testing and development through github contributors

The addition of Multi interface means it’s now possible to issue thousands of request simultaneously with a single ruby thread.

To highlight the added support of the Multi interface here is an example that makes 5 requests to some major sites in parallel.

require 'rubygems'
require 'curb'
responses = {}
requests = ["http://www.google.com/",
            "http://www.yahoo.com/",
            "http://www.ebay.com/",
            "http://www.amazon.com/",
            "http://www.msn.com/",
            "http://www.google.co.uk/",
            "http://www.ruby-lang.org/"]
m = Curl::Multi.new
# add a few easy handles
requests.each do |url|
  responses[url] = ""
  c = Curl::Easy.new(url) do|curl|
    curl.follow_location = true
    curl.on_body{|data| responses[url] << data; data.size }
    curl.on_complete{|cl| puts "done #{curl.last_effective_url}" }
  end
  m.add(c)
end
idle_count = 0
m.perform do
  idle_count += 1
end

requests.each do|url|
  puts "#{url} responded with #{responses[url].size} bytes"
end
puts "idled: #{idle_count} times"

To install:

gem install curb

Enjoy!

Update:

Removed a GC.start inside the perform loop, was only there to verify objects were being correctly collected e.g. testing purposes.

Software Curb, Ruby