Is command line Rails also so slow on Linuxes as it is on Windows?

rubyonrails-talk
1

There is a lot of questions on Stackoverflow about how Rails is slow in command line on Windows machines. I use Windows and know that it is true. All Rake tasks, all rails commands are very slow. Especially testing is slow. I can't test my code as I want because of it.

But some people in their answers say that command line Rails is slow only on Windows. On Linuxes it is ok. But before I switch to some Linux (Ubuntu maybe) I'd like to ask if it is true that Rails on Linux is fast.

If you have an experience of using Rails on both platforms (Windows and Ubuntu, or some other Linux) please tell me, is it really faster/much faster or the same/almost the same?

2

That depends on your definition of fast and slow…

Let’s just say, that I didn’t realize any speedproblems with windows, because years ago many other problems made me switch to linux.

With linux I have TAB-complete for rake, rails, rspec, rvm and many other auxiliary tools via zsh-plugins. I never had any problems when I had to compile gems with native extensions (but with windows I had!).

But I probably think that some speed isues could be because of the rails version you use. In a german ruby chat it is often mentioned that 1.8 and 1.9 are very slow but 2.0 is faster (but still slower than in linux)

3

To support what you are saying, there are newer faster versions of Ruby 2 for Windows as mentioned here:

And Rails 4 is optimized for Ruby 2.

It is also possible that if Windows is being run in a VM, that would be slower, or perhaps the hardware it is running on is slower.

After trying all of that, you might invest in an SSD and more memory, if you don’t have enough.