From: "nikolai.weibull@..." <nikolai.weibull@...>
Date: 2009-10-21T08:55:11+09:00
Subject: Loading program that uses gems on network share is incredibly slow

Hi!

Loading program that uses gems on network share is incredibly slow.
Ruby’s need, due to Rubygems, to search a long list of directories for
a file to load due to a require can become very tedious on, for
example, an SMB share.  Loading about a hundred files and having a
$LOAD_PATH with 20 directories in it equals an insane amount of
filesystem accesses.  Taking network latency into consideration and
you’ve got unworkable delays at startup.

I was wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and, if so,
what they did to solve it.

One solution I thought of would be to delay as many of the requires as
possible, only requiring when the functionality is needed and perhaps
using autoload.

Another thought I had was to force Rubygems to look in the gem that
the require is coming from first, perhaps by inspecting
Kernel#caller.  This would lead to a lot fewer directories being
searched, but would, it seems, require monkeypatching Rubygems.

Is there any way to treat Rubygems more like jars, so that a .gem
would remain packaged until loaded.  This would greatly lessen the
network traffic and filesystem traversal, in my case.

I don’t want to debate the merits of storing files on a network
share.  Deploying programs on an SMB share at work instead of on each
user’s computer saves me so much trouble.

Thanks!