<<<<<<< HEAD This is a utility to speedup gem scripts quite a bit (especially for windows users), by avoiding expensive rubygems calls. Background: By default rubygems runs a require rubygems ... load Gem.bin_path(...) in every gem's auto-generated startup script (ex: the ruby-prof gem has a ruby-prof command--it runs the above before running that command). This is great if you have a complex gem that requires specific version of its dependencies, etc. However, these calls result in an extra slowdown--especially in windows it can take up to an extra 2s, EVERY TIME, at startup. This can be alleviated, however, with this gem. In my box 2s went down to 0.37s (1.9.1 mingw). In linux it can speedup a tidge, too (from 0.3 to 0.16s). How it does it: This gem provides a utility to replace the auto-generated startup script with one that caches the bin_path location so that the second/third/fourth times it starts up almost instantly. This works in 1.9 because of gem_prelude (which makes loading rubygems at times unnecessary), and of the "faster_rubygems" gem for 1.8.x, which is essentially gem_prelude for 1.8. How to use it: # install a gem that has a command line executable, like ruby-prof # install a gem pre-req--necessary because of a bug in rubygems C:> gem install os # install the optimizer C:> gem install faster_gem_scripts # this next line will change based on your ruby location C:> faster_gem_script c:\ruby18\bin\whichr If you want an easier way to discover the path for your commands (and are on windows), you can checkout the whichr gem (http://github.com/rdp/whichr). Caveat: If you update a gem after using this, you'll need to run it again so that it will be sure to cache the location of the latest version of the gem. Other caveat: if your gem has any "complex dependencies" (like it uses the gem command like gem 'some_other_dependency', '= 1.1.9' then this system won't work for you. Try it out to see. You can find out by running it once. If it fails then reinstall the gem to get back to its original functionality.