Ruby Interrupted Bubble Sort
There shouldn't be a speed issue (so far as I can tell), but there is an outright bug:

line.map do |x| x = x.to_i end


You're not storing the result of the map, you're just throwing it away. So line doesn't change, and you end up comparing the elements lexicographically, i.e. as strings. So "48" ends up being less "5" and such.



Other notes:


The Ruby convention is to use 2 spaces for indentation. Not 4 spaces, not tabs.
You don't need semicolons.
When writing a single line block, use {..} instead of do..end
When simply invoking the same single method on all elements in an array, you can use a shortcut: line.map(&amp;:to_i)
You can exclude the last element in a range with 3 dots (...), so 1..arr.length-1 becomes just 1...arr.length


With that and a few other things you get:

def bubble(array, iterations)
  iterations.times do
    (1...array.length).each do |i|
      if array[i-1] &gt; array[i]
        array[i-1], array[i] = array[i], array[i-1]
      end
    end
  end
end


File.open(ARGV[0]).each_line do |line|
  line = line.chomp.split(" ")
  iterations = line.last.to_i

  values = line[0...-2].map(&amp;:to_i)
  bubble(values, iterations)

  puts values.join(" ")
end


Now, this is just a challenge, but for production code, I'd avoid the side-effects of bubble, and return a new array instead. But that's a different story.



Edit: Since it's still too slow, maybe it's because the input is crafted to trick you. For instance, a line that calls for billions of iterations on a relatively small set of values will, with the code above, cause waaay too many pointless iterations. I.e. the list may be sorted already, but the algorithm will keep loop through it the specified number of times.

A pretty simple solution would be something like:

def bubble(array, iterations)
  iterations.times do
    sorted = true
    (1...array.length).each do |i|
      if array[i-1] &gt; array[i]
        sorted = false
        array[i-1], array[i] = array[i], array[i-1]
      end
    end
    break if sorted
  end
end


Additionally, you can skip stuff by checking the number of iterations before calling bubble. If it's zero, there's no need for the map:

File.open(ARGV[0]).each_line do |line|
  line = line.chomp.split(" ")
  iterations = line.last.to_i

  unless iterations.zero?
    values = line[0...-2].map(&amp;:to_i)
    bubble(values, iterations)
  end

  puts values.join(" ")
end


Now of course it may just be that the input is just huge, and Ruby isn't the fastest thing. But one has to assume that the challenge can actually be solved.