On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Ron Jeffries wrote:

> Way more cryptic than I needed. Thanks.

Always a pleasure to render a persons day more surreal. May the force
squeak you!

> Which make me think 5 lines. Wonder what's up with that. Might be
> interesting to zero in on ...

Nah. Googling for that code turns it up in a standard ruby test. I
willing to bet for some reason the mere invocation of ruby is what is slow.

For some reason something somewhere is attempting to do lots when you
fire up ruby. Guesses....

  * That ruby.exe is infected with a virus that is attempting to Take
    Over the World on start up.

  * You have some weird default module special that at start up
    attempts to phone home and perhaps update itself, but hits a
    firewall and timesout. (Weird very unlikely)

  * Some virus scanner is seeing the  ruby subprocess start up and is going
    paranoid and scanning it.


Absolutely no blooming way should on a remotely healthy installation
of ruby should those few lines be taking a "human noticable" length of
time.

If you can find a Windows equivalent of that most invaluable of Unix
utilities, "strace" (do tell me where you got it when you do) get it
to strace which files ruby opens on startup and send that to the
group. strace is mankinds best and most loyal friend, never leave home
without it.

My personal guess is you have a virus.


John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
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