From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2012-04-21T08:56:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Installing ri documentation SLOW (Windows)


On Apr 20, 2012, at 12:21 , Kevin McCaughey wrote:

> When I install new GEMs the ri doc installs are taking forever. I am
> waiting now over 10 minutes on actionpack-3.2.3 ri documentation to
> install.
> 
> I am running Ruby 1.9.3. My machine is Windows 7 x64, 2500k (fast) with
> 8GB RAM.
> 
> I always have problems with documentation installs. Previously I got
> loads of UTF-8 errors, wiped the whole thing and started again.
> 
> It's going on 15 minutes now for this and I think I am going to ctrl_c
> it.

A couple suggestions...

Make sure you are using the gem version of rdoc. A lot of work has gone into it to make it better. I'm not sure how much of that effort is specifically towards making it more performant, but a lot of it is just general cleanup which will help regardless.

Eric Hodel is the current maintainer of rdoc. He doesn't use windows so he can't look into this for you. It would help if you could submit to him as much data as you can (like, if you can run rdoc under the profiler that'd really help... do so on a smaller(ish) gem tho. :) That said, see below. There are some things he simply can't address...

> How come Ruby on Windows is such a mess? I use the proper windows
> installer, but still it is a nightmare getting up and running on rails.

I know that ruby used to have a bug on windows wrt Dir.glob and a couple other things being REALLY slow. I think that's been addressed but I don't know of those patches made it into 1.9.3 or not. You should find the work that Luis Lavena has done on the windows installer. It might have the patches applied.

> I have VM Workstation. Would it just be quicker running all this in a
> virtual machine in Linux?

Haha! Um... Virtual machines... yes. Linux not so much. RVM wouldn't be half as popular without the mess that linux has made for the ruby community. I'd recommend FreeBSD personally.... but if you do go the linux route, DEFINITELY use rvm instead of the package system's ruby.