I'm working on a pretty large (and still growing) project and the bigger
it gets the slower development mode becomes, but runs really fast in
production mode. So I assume the slowdown at the beginning of each
request is caused by the fact that it reloads everything. It currently
has about 85 models, 75 controllers, and 11k Code LOC.
It's becoming really painful. For instance, I'm working on a page that
involves a lot of ajax calls. One call shows the following in the
development.log:
Completed in 0.38060 (2 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02327 (6%) | DB:
0.06884 (18%)
But firebug timed it at 5.38 seconds. 
So that means reloading my
What web server? It would seem that Rails is done with the request pretty
quickly... so the extra time is coming from somewhere else.
Any chance you're using webrick? I could see that happening with a lot of
ajax as webrick can only handle one request at a time...
Our app is about 43,000 lines and has 832 classes and it's not that
slow... we're running litespeed for development...
As it happens, Josh Goebel just released a plugin to deal with this very problem:
http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/dev_mode_performance_fixes/
Why don't we only reload the files when they have actually changed? Store the file names and their last modified time and then stat all the files before every request... if any are newer, kill the objects they originally defined and let the Dependency auto-loading code reload the objects from disk.
People are reporting anywhere between "4x" and "almost as fast as production" speed improvements.
-faisal
Faisal N Jawdat wrote:
As it happens, Josh Goebel just released a plugin to deal with this
very problem:
http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/
dev_mode_performance_fixes/
It catched my eyes too, but I have a project with more LOC, models and
controllers than Tony's project and webrick on a 1.06GHz Centrino Duo is
fast enough for me (nearly all actions take less than 1s and most are
around 0.3s, 3-4 whole seconds seems odd to me unless he uses something
like a Pentium MMX or less for the server), so I don't think his problem
is class reloading (or he must have a pretty peculiar code). Won't hurt
to try though.
Lionel
Philip Hallstrom wrote:
Any chance you're using webrick? I could see that happening with a lot
of
ajax as webrick can only handle one request at a time...
I'm using mongrel. Regular pages take about 2-3 seconds longer to load
then what is shown in development.log. The slow down occurs at the
beginning of the request before anything even shows up in the log. It's
like I hit a link, count to 3, then BAM lots of stuff shows up in log
and page comes in. On pages that might do multiple ajax calls at the
same time, it does tend to take longer. Is mongrel able to handle more
then one request at a time?
One Rails request at a time. Static is threaded...
Our app is about 43,000 lines and has 832 classes and it's not that
slow... we're running litespeed for development...
How much of a delay for each request do you experience in development
mode?
Hardly any. Obviously it takes longer to load since it's dev and we're not caching anything, but it still comes up...
Someone else mentioned DNS... that might be worth looking into as well.
-philip