I haven't been using Rails for nearly as long as you have. As a result, I thought the bootstrap time was something Rails developers just "put up with". I would have thought that someone else would have noticed this problem and done something about it...surprisingly I don't think many have.
Django, by comparison, bootstraps the environment almost instantly.
I have also been looking for an answer for how to deal with this issue, so I just started a bounty on your question for 200 reputation. Looking forward to a good answer; it may very well convince to go back to Rails.
You can slow down the startup time for Django if you have lots of installed apps and nested modules but it is still in the order of seconds rather than tens of seconds.
That's not the dev server, which is able to start and reload pretty fast. That post is complaining about the startup time for loading several pre-forked Python VMs on the first request.
That's pretty much a production problem. It's somewhat common to see "warmup" scripts that make sure all the VMs start.
"That's not the dev server, which is able to start and reload pretty fast...That post is complaining about...a production problem."
The issue is actually that it takes time to load the application code and dependencies, something that applies to Django, Rails and just about any similar framework, regardless of whether it's the production or development environment. In general, the production environment will actually be faster at this.
Just to clarify the context to future readers, I deleted by post because I wasn't interested in discussing django, but since you responded I'm addressing it. My original post pointed out that in my experience it indeed does take time to load django and linked to this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1702562/speeding-up-the-f...
Yeah, I tried Django 2 years ago and sort of wish I had stuck with it primarily for this reason. (Additionally I much prefer the Python "no magic" philosophy, although I've gotten used to tracing through Ruby craziness.)
The Rails community (at least at the time) was so much larger and more open that it seemed like a better bet. Rails 3 was coming up and I knew Yehuda was doing brilliant things with the Rails 3.0 architecture. Plus, Moore's law right? - not helping!
I'd love for some hard core Rails guys to get in here and offer some real solutions! As much as I have issues with some things about Rails, it is largely a great tool for me, and I know it so well I'd like to be able to continue using it without tearing my hair out every time I need to run a simple test.
Django, by comparison, bootstraps the environment almost instantly.
I have also been looking for an answer for how to deal with this issue, so I just started a bounty on your question for 200 reputation. Looking forward to a good answer; it may very well convince to go back to Rails.