From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2011-03-22T06:26:11+09:00
Subject: Re: rubygems-update 1.6.0 Released

On Mar 21, 2011, at 6:54 AM, Roger Pack wrote:
>> 2 Major Enhancements:
> 
> Cool thanks for the release.
> 
> If you ever get the time for it, the following are a couple ideas that 
> might help speed up rubygems on windows.  I had some success with them 
> with my faster_rubygems project, but haven't kept up with the latest 
> updates.  Some of these may already be included in rubygems I don't 
> know...
> 
> 1) use marshal instead of yaml for the specs (this helps jruby boot more 
> quickly since yaml is a heavier dependency on that VM).

The on-disk gemspecs are not in yaml format, they're in ruby format.

> 2) combine all the gemspec files into one "cached" gemspec file, per gem 
> directory.

I haven't been willing to sacrifice the simplicity for doing something better in this area, there are many other places in RubyGems that need to be improved.  Feel free to take a crack at it, though.

> 3) also cache somehow a list of each "requireable" file within each gem 
> (for instance, within the file for 2).  Then for 
> Gem.searcher.find_in_unresolved you just iterate over that list instead 
> of actually hitting the file system.

I tried this once before and found it to be significantly slower than Dir[].  I believe I was working on OS X at the time.

Note: RubyGems no longer places bin/ from gems with executables on $LOAD_PATH anymore, so the amount of globs required has been cut in (up to) half.

> The combination of these makes for lightning fast rubygems in windows, 
> though I'm not sure which one has most effect.

Benchmarks would be required, of course.