Improve Ruby on Rails Performance Windows 7

I'm pursuing Ruby on Rails development but using windows to perform rake and rails tasks is PAINFULLY slow, but I heard it's quite the opposite on Linux.

I'm using a Netbook (Acer Aspire One 722) for development and using Vi开发者_开发问答rtualBox to run Ubuntu is out of the question. Doing the whole dual boot thing is also not an option because I run into severe processor load balancing and heating issues that I really do not have the luxury of time to troubleshoot right now.

What I would like to know is: is there anything I can install or any settings I can change that will give me linux-like speed when performing these rake and rails tasks on windows 7?

I've heard that Cygwin and Mingw are "linux emulators", is there any way I could leverage them?

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I've been doing development on a mix of windows 7, mac os x , and ubuntu linux and my experience is that native windows is by far the slowest rails environment. I have found linux under a VM to be not so bad, but that's clearly out of the picture for you.

• Windows 7 on my i7 /16GB of ram is slower than my 3 year old macbook running OSX
• Once you have the server up and running on windows, it's not terribly slow, but as you mentioned any rake tasks take a very long time
• ruby 1.9 is much faster than 1.8
• Ubuntu under a virtual machine in Windows is much faster than rails native on windows
• Mac OSX seems faster than linux
• Cygwin only has ruby 1.8 by default, so you have to compile 1.9 yourself if you want any decent speed. Even after doing that, I still didn't notice any speeds faster than the generic non-cygwin windows install.

Some of the answers here might be helpful in explaining as well: Why is ruby so much slower on windows?

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It most probably does not have much to do with compiler optimizations. The CPU is the same, whether windows or linux. The hardware (HD controllers, RAM etc.) are the same too, and driver differences should not matter that much.

BUT: syscalls differ, and for windows, filesystem accesses and especially stat is slower.

Check this tip for improving ruby performance on windows.

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I have a strong feeling that the culprit is the windows file system. I used to work with large number of files on Window and had to switch to Linux to process them as it took 'a couple of full moons' to search a file.