Haml rocks. I haven’t seen any recent performance numbers but it is pretty close to erb these days. I think that it might be faster than erb if you turn on ugly mode (which prevents the pretty indentation) We’re doing 2.8 million pageviews a day with Haml.
There is a benchmarker checked into the Haml source tree:
http://github.com/nex3/haml/tree/master/test
Update November 2009
Nathan (Haml’s main developer) published some Haml 2.2 benchmarks on his blog. You can see the exact numbers there but in short:
- Normal (pretty printing) mode = 2.8 times slower than ERB
- Ugly mode (no pretty tabs added) = equal to ERB
You can enable ugly mode by placing Haml::Template::options[:ugly] = true in an initializer or environment file. Note that ugly mode isn’t really that ugly – the resulting HTML is actually much prettier than ERB – it’s just not indented nicely.