Why is Ruby, and Ruby on Rails (1.8.6 One Click Installer, local database) so ruddy slow on Windows?
ruby script/server - 30 seconds
rake test - 45 seconds
etc.
Yet, when I pop over to a much slower linux box, it's virtually instantaneous. I've checked everything - no significant CPU processes running, no network issues... and so on.
Heck, I'd be happy with just a verbose output that at least told me where it was breaking down. Any suggestions?
In general Ruby's MRI interpreter is just not optimized for speed on windows. You might also be running it in development mode on windows vs production mode on the other machines. Rails runs much slower in development mode since it reloads all your classes on every request.
1.8.6 is a very old ruby version. Released almost 3 years ago. You should strongly consider upgrading to 1.9 (or at least 1.8.7). Or switching to JRuby. All of these options will likely lead to a significant performance improvement.
1.8.7 should be fully compatible with 1.8.6. 1.9 has a completely new interpreter that runs 2.5 times faster (Though it has a tendency to occasionally crash on windows). JRuby may be the ideal solution for you since you can run it in either compatibility for 1.8 or 1.9 and it is very stable, but it does not support gems with C extensions and requires a different database adapter.
One last option would be to try running Rails inside of a VMWare with CentOS or another Linux distribution.
The reason is that file stat's in windows are dreadfully slow, and, since Ruby is written on Linux (and optimized for Linux), there hasn't been much work to make it faster.
Using the rubyinstaller.org (1.8.6 or 1.9.x) can make it faster--I'd recommend 1.8.6 since 1.9 has some slowdowns of its own.
If you're looking to get really aggressive, you can try my faster_gem_script gem, which tries to cache the heck out of require based look ups and thus speed things up. Do it with a scratch version of ruby, though :)
Unfortunately Jruby also isn't known for its exceedingly fast lookups. Hopefully this situation will change someday. Until then my faster_gem_script and faster_require are the only way I know of to try to get some speedup.
For a speedup you could try my loader speeder upper (helps rails run faster in doze): https://github.com/rdp/faster_require
Also checkout spork, which works in doze, and jruby also works well.
-rp
UPDATE: Thanks (in part) to some really great work on Fenix by Luis Lavena, Ruby 1.9.3-p327 is much, much faster on Windows. rake used to take 110+ seconds to execute on 1.9.3-p125, and now takes ~20 seconds on p327. Rails is finally usable on Windows!!
Use RubyInstaller to install..
I like taking this approach:
slow rails stack
In my case its
finisher_hook: 22.463 sec
That is the culprit
Related
I am running Mac OSX 12.1. I have some rails 6 apps and they are working normally in regard to memory usage.
But rails 5.2.6 has a strange memory issue. When I start a rails server or run rspec, the usage of the CPU is normal i.e. low when not much is happening but higher when large tests or heavy server usage occurs.
However, when I use rails console the CPU usage climbs almost immediately to over 100%, and pretty soon the Mac fan starts to run. It stays this way even if I exit the console. I have to do killall ruby to stop all ruby processes. I am monitoring memory using top -o cpu. Is this a known issue with rails 5.2.6? Is there a way to stop this happening?
I was experiencing the same problem for quite a while. I've eventually noticed that it's a problem with the listen gem. Updating it is enough to fix it.
Update it to the latest version possible. If I remember correctly, it has to be at least v3.3 for the problem to go away.
I suggest to check what initializes when you do rails c. You def should profile your startup times. Start checking your config/initializers folder and also consider Profiling Rails Boot Time. Also check how to Speed up Rails boot time.
I don't believe this is specific to 5.2.6 but make sure you use at least ruby 2.7.0 ish which also affects your performance.
I was dismayed to find that rake takes 20+ seconds to load before running my Rails tests. I searched and it seems that everything in Rails is just much slower on Windows. I tried to use spork but it doesn't work on Windows.
So how do you test Rails on Windows? How do you setup your environment?
How about continuous testing?
After a TON of searches the takeaways are:
1) Ruby (and therefore Rails) on Windows is painfully slow.
2) There's an attempt to make Ruby faster on windows (https://github.com/thecodeshop/ruby/wiki/Downloads). Although it's not as fast as in *nix, it's fast enough to work with.
So the answer is: Avoid developing Rails on Windows if you can. If you still want/have to develop on Windows then replace your Ruby files with The Code Shop's Ruby build, it will give you a workable speed.
As a side note, for all the talk about being open, embracing diversity, etc. the Ruby and Rails community is very antagonistic to people asking how to do X or Y on Windows. On my searches most of the posts I saw were to the tone of "Winblows sux00rz! get a Mac or Linux".
Update:
I got spork + autotest + growl working on Windows so testing is much faster and automated. I put the instructions in this blog post.
I'm looking to upgrade my rails project from 1.8.7 to 1.9.2, but, when I swapped ruby versions in RVM, I had same issues getting the app started. (mostly with mysql (which... 64bit mysql on mac (any version) is a pain to set up, and almost impossible))...
But anyway, aside from mysql problems, is there anything I would need to change in my code that is no longer supported in 1.9.2?
There is way too many subtle changes to cover in something like SO, but this covers it quite well (I'm not involved in any way):
http://www.rubyinside.com/19walkthrough/
Assuming you're using fairly standard Ruby there shouldn't be anything which will cause problems, but I'm sure your tests will point out anything that needs fixing.
I have a old app made on rails 1.2.5, this application have alot of access per day.
I intend to upgrade my server (a joyent accelerator) to run ruby 1.9.x and work with rails 3 but I can't stop or move this app to another server.
Have any way to run this application on ruby 1.9?
or run two ruby versions (1.8.7 and 1.9) at the same time?
or on the last case upgrade my app to work with rails 3?
Thanks.
There was quite a few patches to Rails to make it run under Ruby 1.9. I think you are up for a challenge if you try to do that. With Ruby Version Manager you can work with multiple ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems.
Does it have to be switched over to Rails3 and Ruby 1.9?
Can you just throw you old app on a virtualized server and keep the app running as is?
The reason for my suggestion is that we just went through a similar case. A local business (a construction association) had a pair of apps developed for them 2-3 years ago (works with Rails 1.2.6). Nothing overly major (a billing app, and a bid/contractor/customer management system). Everything works, so no need to update anything.
Their hosting provider was not willing to keep an old outdated rails available in shared hosting environment. Hosting shop cited maintenance can't be streamlined, security concerns, etc. Sure enough, the same host offers to rewrite the apps for current technologies (for a price, of course).
Client wasn't happy with them. The shop that developed the apps since closed and the developers left for greener pastures. But everything works, so why reinvent the wheel, right? Client went looking for alternatives. Came to us. We sat down with the client, did some cost/benefit analysis and decided to just host in a virtualized environment (at another provider). Did that in a week (with some hick-ups): back-up, move, restore, test, everything works. And it's been working now for 3 months without any issues.
This might not work for you, but unless you need to add to the app why fix what ain't broken?
Rails 3 works with Ruby 1.8.7
Another option (apart from obvious RVM) is to leave your Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 1.x as is and install latest JRuby and Rails 3.0 and dependent gems with jruby -S gem install rails. Ruby and JRuby gems perfectly coexist without any interference. OpenSolaris in Joyent's Accelerator is good at running Java, so you won't have much problems with it.
P.S. Btw, I won't recommend updating your Rails 1.x app to 3.x, unless you're planning to add lots of new features to it. It can be very painful, especially if you used lots of old-school gems and plugins.
I have recently been building very small and simple apps using Locomotive 2.0.8. Until now it has been the ideal solution, but recently the application has slowed to absolute crawl. It takes literally 10 minutes to boot up, 5 minutes to add an existing or new project - and often these creations don't even work correctly. I can't imagine what I have done. I have tried uninstalling Locomotive, and clearing my directories. What could be causing this? Something to do with RubyGems? any other solutions besides Locomotive? Or how can I completely uninstall Loco, gems, and all my projects and essentially format my dev environment to start anew?
Locomotive isn't really necessary anymore. You used to be a pain to get a decent ruby environment running on os x, but these days it's easy. Google for 'compiling ruby mac os x'
Another solution to getting your rails apps running is to use Pow to serve it and then use Anvil to control Pow.
Bam!