Fastest Ruby RSS Parser?

I was working on a project the other day that needed to parse a lot of RSS feeds and would need to poll & parse them frequently. So once again I had the question 'which ruby rss parser should i use?' in my mind.

Back when I was working for twitterfeed we performed some testing to find the optimal library that could fetch and parse the feeds fast. It was found then that Feedzirra performed the best as you could use a multiple fetch using curb.

For now I only wanted to know how fast these libraries would just parse the feeds, I was not worried about the http fetching.

I had some time so I returned to a nice performance test suite created by Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr.

I forked the suite, updated it to use bundler, order the results and to use the latest gems and then re-ran the performance test. You can find my fork here if you are interested.

The results were (ran on my macbook pro 2.53ghz, 4gb ram, SSD):

ruby feed-parser-bench.rb 1000

feedzirra => Average: 0.0278322427572428 (0 errors) RSS: 0.0260872052845528 Atom: 0.0295189980353635
mrss => Average: 0.042981384305835 (7 errors) RSS: 0.039129512244898 Atom: 0.0467262599206349
syndication => Average: 0.0495069849548646 (4 errors) RSS: 0.0398204020408163 Atom: 0.0588687712031558
rfeedparser => Average: 0.452556951048951 (0 errors) RSS: 0.389084115853658 Atom: 0.513909868369352
simplerss => Average: 1.29865328871129 (0 errors) RSS: 0.20822887195122 Atom: 2.35265881532417

The result was simple - Feedzirra was still the fastest.