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Comment by dcu | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest problem with rails is that it boots really slow on development so it's really boring. I switched to padrino a while ago due to this issue. Also I prefer padrino's router since it's more explicit.

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Seriously? How often do you need to reboot Rails? In dev mode it reloads code as it's changed, so pretty much the only time you need to reboot Rails is when you change the configuration or update your gems. Maybe once a week, say. The startup time is a couple of seconds, so you switched frameworks to save a couple seconds a week. Hardcore.

heh. running specs requires to boot rails, starting the console, switching branchs, reviewing code, etc...

rails boots fast if you have few files but when the project is big it is a pain, it takes a lot of time to boot and it's not fun. That's why the article says rails is "a day job".

I just hope the rails team don't think like you.

You don't need to restart the rails app when running specs if you use spork. Also ruby 1.9.3 vastly improved rails application boot times over 1.9.2, just in case your slow experience was with 1.9.1.x - 1.9.2.x.

Spork's a fine notion, but it's no panacea. Pretty regularly we would be running down some weird bug only to discover that we had to restart. It doesn't take a lot of 10-minute debugging excursions to eat up all the time that Spork saves on starting tests.

The boot times is one of the main reasons rails feels like a day job for me. It is there for every rake task, every time I need to generate a migration, every time I need to use the console. All this waiting makes me lose my flow and forget what I was doing.

You should check out Zeus (https://github.com/burke/zeus). "Boot any rails app in under a second". It'll use more memory, unless you want to GC-patch your ruby (instructions in the repo).

yeah already saw it, but why are these hacks needed in first place? I am pretty sure there's a good way to fix rails to load faster in a reasonable amount of time (again, I am talking about big projects).

Extensive work has already gone into improving Rails startup time. If you want to further improve it, try removing railties you aren't using.

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