jnicklas/capybara — Issue #598: `gem 'capybara'` in Gemfile noticeably impacts application bootup time
Author: aspiers
Created: 2012-01-08 13:32:44+00:00
State: open

Rails boot-up time is a [hot topic](http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-1-9-3-faster-loading-times-require-4927.html) these days, and I got curious why my small application was taking a long time to start on Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.3. I tried running `time rails r 1` repeatedly, each time adding gems to or trimming gems from `Gemfile` to see their relative impact, and it seems that capybara is a worse offender than most, weighing in around a cost of around 0.4 seconds on my fairly old machine. Is there anything obvious which can be done to improve this?