Version 3.4.* 5 times slower than version 3.3.0

[fguillen]

I upgraded the gem from 3.3.0 to 3.4.6 and my tests were running 5 times slower.

After a bit of analysis I figured out that the slow part was the creation of model with authlogic activated, for example:

class PublisherUser < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_authentic do |c|
    c.validate_email_field = false
  end

  [...]
end

This is a basic benchmark of a test with different versions of authlogic running:

authlogic "3.4.6" -> Finished in 0.314139s, 3.1833 runs/s, 0.0000 assertions/s.
authlogic "3.4.3" -> Finished in 0.341770s, 2.9259 runs/s, 0.0000 assertions/s.
authlogic "3.3.0" -> Finished in 0.064682s, 15.4603 runs/s, 0.0000 assertions/s.

[tiegz]

@fguillen this may be because the default crypto provider was changed from sha-512 to scrypt. Did you use sha-512 originally, and can you confirm that it's faster if you explicitly set it back to sha-512?

[fguillen]

@tiegz thanks for the suggestion, it really makes a difference:

Without explicit crypto provider:

Finished in 47.635423s, 0.9447 runs/s, 2.3302 assertions/s.

With the setting in every acts_as_authentic entity of c.crypto_provider = Authlogic::CryptoProviders::Sha512:

Finished in 9.295282s, 4.8412 runs/s, 11.9415 assertions/s.

I don't know if you want to close this issue or not.. for me looks like a bug that the crypto provider library change is making my code 5 times slower :/

[tiegz]

@fguillen I can see how it's painful, but the purpose of a strong cryptographic hashing algorithm is to be time-consuming [to make brute forcing harder]. I've preset the crypted_password in my test models to avoid this in the past, and also set a lower cost when I was using BCrypt specifically for my tests.

It looks like the newer version of the scrypt gem added a way to set the cost. Upgrading authlogic to this 2.* scrypt would be a great fix, plus a note in the README for people to lower the cost for their tests.

[tiegz]

@fguillen I just realized authlogic 3.4.6 allows scrypt 2.* in the gemspec. If you gem 'scrypt', '~> 2.1' in your Gemfile and bundle, you should be able to do this in your test helper:

SCrypt::Engine.calibrate!(max_time: 0.01)

:thumbsup:?

[fguillen]

👍 this does the job :)