Question

I just started out with Rails, so excuse my fairly basic question. I am already noticing that the rake routes command takes a while to execute everytime I run it. I have about 20 routes for 3 controllers and it takes about 40 seconds to execute.

Is that normal? How could I speed this up?

P.S.: I am on Windows 7 with Rails 3.1.3 (set up with Rails Installer).

Answer 1

The rake routes task depends on the environment task which loads your Rails environment and requires thousands of Ruby files.

The startup time of a Rails environment and the corresponding rake routes execution time are very close (on my Linux on-steroids-laptop with a Rails application with ~ 50 routes):

$ time ruby -r./config/environment.rb -e ''

real    0m5.065s
user    0m4.552s
sys 0m0.456s

$ time rake routes

real    0m4.955s
user    0m4.580s
sys 0m0.344s

There is no easy way to decrease startup time as it relies on the way your interpreter requires script files : http://rhnh.net/2011/05/28/speeding-up-rails-startup-time