Forum: Ruby gem install SUPER SLOW in linux virtual machine

I'm switching a project over to working in a linux virtual machine,
running in windows xp.  Ruby and rails are working generally, but
there's one gem (ferret) that i need to get for this project.  I typed
in "gem install ferret" and got a message "Updating metadata for 903
gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org".

Fair enough, except that it's been doing that for over an hour now (more
like an hour and a half).  Whenever i've done this in windows it's taken
a minute or two at most.

Does anyone know why it might be so slow?  My network connection (wired)
out of the linux vm is otherwise pretty fast, about 6 Mb at the moment.

thanks
max

Max Williams wrote:
> I'm switching a project over to working in a linux virtual machine,
> running in windows xp.  Ruby and rails are working generally, but
> there's one gem (ferret) that i need to get for this project.  I typed
> in "gem install ferret" and got a message "Updating metadata for 903
> gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org".
> 
> Fair enough, except that it's been doing that for over an hour now (more
> like an hour and a half).  Whenever i've done this in windows it's taken
> a minute or two at most.
> 
> Does anyone know why it might be so slow?  My network connection (wired)
> out of the linux vm is otherwise pretty fast, about 6 Mb at the moment.
> 
> thanks
> max

I ended up killing this and forcing the install without update with

 sudo gem install ferret --no-update-sources

So, i'm up and running but still puzzled over why it was taking so long. 
I tried starting it again and once again it looked like taking much 
longer than usual (I killed it again).  So, if anyone has any ideas i'd 
still like to know :)

Max Williams wrote:
> So, i'm up and running but still puzzled over why it was taking so long. 
> I tried starting it again and once again it looked like taking much 
> longer than usual (I killed it again).  So, if anyone has any ideas i'd 
> still like to know :)

If you're not running >1.0.0 then try upgrading.

In previous versions Rubygems used up a LOT of memory as YAML parsed the 
update log. On my server this led to memory swapping and taking ages. 
It's largely fixed in later versions. I think they use Marshal now??

best,
Dan

On Jan 22, 2008, at 06:14 AM, Max Williams wrote:
>> like an hour and a half).  Whenever i've done this in windows it's  
> sudo gem install ferret --no-update-sources
>
> So, i'm up and running but still puzzled over why it was taking so  
> long.
> I tried starting it again and once again it looked like taking much
> longer than usual (I killed it again).  So, if anyone has any ideas  
> i'd
> still like to know :)

Can you run it under the profiler?

From: "Max Williams" <toastkid.williams@gmail.com>
>> 
>> Does anyone know why it might be so slow?  My network connection (wired)
>> out of the linux vm is otherwise pretty fast, about 6 Mb at the moment.

Any possibility the virtual machine was swapping (out of RAM) ?

That happened to me on a 512 MB linux system under VMWare, during the
"building rdoc documentation" portion of a gem install... it was 
swapping
so badly it became horrendously slow... I let it run for a couple hours 
before
giving up and killing it.


Regards,

Bill

Eric Hodel wrote:

> Can you run it under the profiler?

sure - using 'top' (the extent of my profiling knowledge) i can see that 
gem is using
cpu - negligible (0.2%)
ram - 10% (of the virtual memory allocated to the virtual machine?)
virt - 63624 (is this in kB? 63 meg sounds about right for 10%)

So, it doesn't seem to be using excessive amounts of memory, but i don't 
know enough to tell whether lots of swapping is happening.

Thanks for the help guys btw :)