OpenSSL causing very slow Rails boot time on Windows - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm having a problem with Ruby on Rails running extremely slowly. I'm using Ruby 2.1.3p242 and Rails 4.2.1 on a Windows 8 machine.
Whenever I run anything that requires rails to boot (including tests) it takes a long time to get up and running. I put some calls to Benchmark in config/environment.rb on a clean install of rails:
require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__)
User cpu System Cpu Total Cpu elapsed time
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 (0.000000)
Rails.application.initialize!
15.282000 2.891000 18.173000 ( 18.201173)
Clearly Rails.application.initialize is taking an absurdly long time considering its a clean install.
Thanks in advance for your help
Edit-1: I'm running on a dual core i3 4010u#1.7GHZ with 4gb of RAM. I don't think my machine is too bad as it runs most things very well.
Edit-2: I ran ruby-prof on Rails.application.initialize and found the culprit. A process was taking up 85% of the run time:
<Module::SecureRandom>#random_bytes
<Module::OpenSSL::Random>#random_bytes
This is apparently occuring in Ruby21/lib/ruby/2.1.0/securerandom.rb#62
I looked up line 62 in that file and this is what I found:
return OpenSSL::Random.random_bytes(n)
So anyone have any idea what this means?

Answer 1

Edit-2: I ran ruby-prof on Rails.application.initialize and found the
culprit. A process was taking up 85% of the run time:
<Module::SecureRandom>#random_bytes
<Module::OpenSSL::Random>#random_bytes
Yeah, the OpenSSL code for seeding the random number generator is problematic on Windows. See Random Numbers and Windows Issues on the OpenSSL wiki.
return OpenSSL::Random.random_bytes(n)
So anyone have any idea what this means?
Ruby is returning random numbers. In this case, OpenSSL will autoseed itself before retuning random number with RAND_poll since no other seed was provided.
Ruby should not call RAND_poll or allow it to be implicitly called by the library. If the random number generator has not been seeded, then the library will automatically seed itself by calling RAND_poll internally.
Rather, Ruby should read bytes from the OS using CryptGenRandom, and then call OpenSSL's RAND_seed. That will avoid the call to RAND_poll.

Answer 2

Putting this in my config/application.rb (before require 'rails/all') speeds up rails s by 10-15 seconds on windows.
require 'securerandom'
SecureRandom.hex(16)

Answer 3

I have been a windows rails dev for a while now. I have never solved this rails startup issue. Running a microsecond Rspec test takes rails 22 seconds to load on my PC.
When I (temporarily) comment out the line in securerandom.rb (all ruby versions) and replace it with a hardcoded return the startup time is reduced to 10 seconds.
#return OpenSSL::Random.random_bytes(n)
return "\xD3\x04F\f0\xD6{G\xB9\x81"