As I've been adding more and more CSS/JS files to my Rails app, I've been noticing a huge slowdown in page load times. Most of the assets are tiny controller-specific files, but the size of those files is irrelevant.
By default, Rails 4.0 turns on "debug mode" for your assets. As a result, every single page load sends a separate request for each asset. Even though most of these return a 304 Not Modified header, it still slows things down by having to send/receive a couple hundred requests.
Simply disabling asset debugging in config/development.rb drastically
improved the page load time in the browser:
1 2 3 4 | # Debug mode disables concatenation and preprocessing of assets. # This option may cause significant delays in view rendering with a large # number of complex assets. config.assets.debug = false |
Note that this is different from production mode; Rails still recognizes when you change your assets and will automatically reload them without needing to restart the server. The primary change is that the CSS/JS is concatenated into single files.
Before the change, Chrome took around 1.8 seconds to fully load a page. After the change, 450ms. Development mode feels much snappier now!