This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Robby Russell. Original Post: Rails Development Performance Tip - dev_mode_performance_fixes Feed Title: Robby on Rails Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails Feed Description: Ruby on Rails development, consulting, and hosting from the trenches... Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Robby Russell Latest Posts From Robby on Rails

When you’re running a Rails application in development mode, you might notice that it takes a little longer for requests to get processed and this is somewhat intentional as the framework is was designed to allow you to run the application and make live changes to it. This way you can do some basic functional tests from your web browser, work on HTML/CSS changes, or anything else that might need to be done in development mode.

Anyhow, this can be slow from time to time and if you’ve done much Ajax work, you might be familiar with how slow this can feel when performing some basic tasks. Well, thanks to Josh Goebel, we can speed up things with a new plugin he just released.

To install via piston:

cd vendor/plugin; piston import http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/dev_mode_performance_fixes/

To install via script/plugin:

./script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/dev_mode_performance_fixes/

Josh has posted some benchmarks and in my totally basic tests… shows about four times (4x) speed improvement for reqs/sec!

How does it work? From what I can tell, it works somewhat like autotest, in that keeps things cached and when it sees files modified, it re-caches the changes. He’s made it so that the stack doesn’t need to reload for each request, which is quite slow.

Since it’s development-mode only, I’d encourage you to install it and give it a whirl.

Have Fun!