From: James Tucker Date: 2010-08-21T02:16:50+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:31802] Re: [Bug #3726] require degradation from 1.9.1 It is also worth noting that this is actually measuring the load time for rubygems itself. A more accurate representation of the speed of require would come from first loading rubygems explicitly. require 'rubygems' Profile { require 'pg' } Even this has some issues, as the source_index is loaded for the first gem load, and then not required to be loaded each time, so a yet more accurate approach might be something like: require 'rubygems' require 'hoe' Profile { require 'pg' } As said before, optimisations in this area need to be done in rubygems (and are in progress).