Rails 3 - Speed up Console Loading Time

Question

I am wondering if there is any relatively easy way to speed up my console load time, which is starting to approach 30 seconds. I have a lot of subclasses whose methods don\

Answer 1

I finally found my startup bottlenecks using Benchmark. In particular, navigate to the bundler gem and in lib/bundler/runtime.rb, find the line that does Kernel.require and wrap it like this:

puts Benchmark.measure("require #{file}") {
  Kernel.require file
}.format("%n: %t %r")

You may have to add require 'benchmark' somewhere in your app, like in config/boot.rb. That will show you how long it takes to require each gem. I can't guarantee your results will match mine, but I had a few gems that were taking over a second to load compared with sub-millisecond for most. A few were gems that I didn't need for developing but I did need for some tasks in the development environment, e.g. capistrano, shoulda. I benchmarked other areas of startup (initializers, etc), but couldn't find any significant bottlenecks.

I haven't yet figured out a clean way to configure the app to only load those for tasks where they are really needed. Possibly, I could create an environment called :speedy and use RAILS_ENV=speedy rails s/c for startup when I know I don't need those gems. Then in Gemfile, I could use group :speedy to exclude those gems in certain cases.

All that said, the biggest startup annoyance for me is having to load the entire environment to run a rake task. I could probably exclude most gems for that, but Gemfile would start to get messy so I don't know if it's worth it.