Archive for os x

Speeding up gem on OS X Leopard

March 19, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under os x, ruby

Update: gem has changed for the better, and this is no longer necessary. Go ahead and gem update --system.

After upgrading to Leopard from Tiger, I noticed that certain network operations for some processes suddenly took forever. Most noticeably, when gem would update metadata. And I’m not the only one.

It’s not so bad anymore, and all I had to do was grab something from the standard library.

In gem (mine’s at /usr/local/bin/gem), add this line before any other code:

require 'resolv-replace'

Done. Seriously. gem will work much faster. Not as fast as you remember from Tiger, but getting there.

Discussions I’ve had suggest that Leopard isn’t caching DNS requests from certain processes, and letting Ruby handle that itself gets around this.

Update: Here’s the current state of my /usr/local/bin/gem:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
#--
# Copyright 2006 by Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Jim Weirich and others.
# All rights reserved.
# See LICENSE.txt for permissions.
#++

require 'resolv-replace'

require 'rubygems'
require 'rubygems/gem_runner'

required_version = Gem::Requirement.new ">= 1.8.2"

unless required_version.satisfied_by? Gem::Version.new(RUBY_VERSION) then
  abort "Expected Ruby Version #{required_version}, was #{RUBY_VERSION}"
end

# We need to preserve the original ARGV to use for passing gem options
# to source gems.  If there is a -- in the line, strip all options after
# it...its for the source building process.
args = !ARGV.include?("--") ? ARGV.clone : ARGV[0...ARGV.index("--")]

Gem::GemRunner.new.run args

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