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Lately, I’ve been using RadRails for Rails development on my laptop (ubuntu linux), and for some reason I find it painfully slow. I decided to google “RadRails performance” and stumbled upon JRockit, an optimized JVM for multiple platforms.

I downloaded JRockit from the BEA site and followed the installation instructions for linux to get it running. So, here’s the quick summary of how I put RadRails on JRockit.

Download the JRockit installer, put it somewhere, and make it executable:

$ chmod +x jrockit-R26.0.0-jdk1.5.0_04-linux-ia32.bin

Now you can run the installer in console mode and it will walk you through the rest of the process. I used the defaults for everthing and just Next’d my way through.

$ ./jrockit-R26.0.0-jdk1.5.0_04-linux-ia32.bin -mode=console

With JRockit installed, getting RadRails to use it is a simple matter of appending the -vm argument when launching it. You can do this directly from the command line, or if you’ve created an icon launcher, you can edit its command:

$ ./radrails -vm ~/jrockit-R26.0.0-jdk1.5.0_04/bin/java

The speed improvement is noticeable, but it’s nothing earth shattering. Still, it saves me a few seconds when I open files—before JRockit it would take ~3-5 seconds to open a file. Now it’s down to about one second which is at least bearable. I’m really starting the feel the hurt of not having TextMate on linux. I think it’s time to bite the bullet and pick up one of those new MacBooks. Now, if I could only convince my wife…

UPDATE: after several crashes and a decision to revert to the default (Sun) JVM, I found Christian Pelczarski’s article on the subject in which he claims “[the] new Sun JVM seems a bit faster than JRockit.” (Granted, his article pertains to Windows, but I figured I’d try it anyways.) I’ve been running RadRails with it for about an hour now; performance is about the same as with JRockit 5, but it’s certainly more stable.