I’ve been doing rails development on a Vista box recently and was annoyed by how slow script/server (running mongrel) was to respond.

I am aware that Windows is slower in general for running ruby / rails but this was slooooooow.

I normally start rails development server with the standard ‘ruby script/server’ command…

C:\blah> ruby script\server
=> Booting Mongrel (use 'script/server webrick' to force WEBrick)
=> Rails application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Call with -d to detach
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000
** Starting Rails with development environment...
...

Notice that mongrel binds to 0.0.0.0 (as far as I remember, it used to bind to 127.0.0.1). This does work. But it is very slow, so I tried changing it to bind to 127.0.0.1

C:\blah> ruby script\server -b 127.0.0.1
=> Booting Mongrel (use 'script/server webrick' to force WEBrick)
=> Rails application starting on http://127.0.0.1:3000
=> Call with -d to detach
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server
** Starting Mongrel listening at 127.0.0.1:3000
** Starting Rails with development environment...
...

And guess what, a subjective 300-400% increase in responsiveness. This makes the whole development process much more pleasant.

Hope this helps someone.

I eeeventually (har har) got my eeePC delivered and I love it.

I already have it pimped out with full-blown Kde and Ruby on Rails, although the included range of software was amazing. You get Amarok music player (I prefer it to ITunes) Photo editor and manager, Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird and tonnes of other applications all of which look very polished.

Here’s the welcome to rails page!

It’s a fast little fecker for the size, plays DivX without issues. I get about 2 hours of battery when I’m running with WiFi and working it hard. The thing gets surprisingly hot while running, but I suppose that’s to be expected when you cram so much into such a small space.

The keyboard is just big enough for two handed typing and the build quality is very sturdy. As it’s all solid state you don’t have to worry about bangs ruining your hard drive.

All in all I’m very pleased with it and happy to have a computer I can take with me wherever I go.

ps. This article was posted on it, including image editing and secure copying to my website…