>> |One issue that continually fails to gain sustainable traction is identifying
>> |the root causes and fixing the 1.9.x IO performance regressions on Windows.
>>
>> Besides I've heard that the IO performance has been improved on 1.9.3;
>
> This is true and the performance improvement is much appreciated progress.

I think rubygems' load time has been improved, but I was surprised to
run some benchmarks a few days ago with 1.9.3RC1 and find it 20-100%
slower than 1.9.2
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyinstaller/browse_thread/thread/326973e5ed3feb22

FWIW.
-roger-