gem install SUPER SLOW in linux virtual machine

[Max Williams]

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]

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

 

[Daniel Lucraft]

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

 

[Eric Hodel]

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

Can you run it under the profiler?

 

[Bill Kelly]

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

 

[Max Williams]

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