From: "Max Williams" <toastkid.williams / gmail.com>
> Max Williams wrote:
>> I'm switching a project over to working in a linux virtual machine,
>> running in windows xp.  Ruby and rails are working generally, but
>> there's one gem (ferret) that i need to get for this project.  I typed
>> in "gem install ferret" and got a message "Updating metadata for 903
>> gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org".
>> 
>> Fair enough, except that it's been doing that for over an hour now (more
>> like an hour and a half).  Whenever i've done this in windows it's taken
>> a minute or two at most.
>> 
>> Does anyone know why it might be so slow?  My network connection (wired)
>> out of the linux vm is otherwise pretty fast, about 6 Mb at the moment.

Any possibility the virtual machine was swapping (out of RAM) ?

That happened to me on a 512 MB linux system under VMWare, during the
"building rdoc documentation" portion of a gem install... it was swapping
so badly it became horrendously slow... I let it run for a couple hours before
giving up and killing it.


Regards,

Bill