Mauricio Fernandez wrote:
> FastRI is an alternative to the ri documentation browser for Ruby.
> [...]
> Visible changes since version 0.3.0
> ===================================
> * speed increases
> [...]
> Compare the execution time when installed with RubyGems:
>   $ time fri -f plain String > /dev/null
> 
>   real	0m0.385s
>   user	0m0.244s
>   sys	0m0.036s
> 
> to the time fri actually takes to run, without the overhead introduced by 
> RubyGems:
>   $ time ruby bin/fri -f plain String > /dev/null
> 
>   real	0m0.088s
>   user	0m0.040s
>   sys	0m0.008s
> [...]

Hm, the times are different on my box (P4 2.4 GHz, 1 G RAM,
Gentoo Linux, ruby 1.8.6 (2007-12-03 patchlevel 113) no threads):

  $ time fri -f plain String > /dev/null
  
  real	0m0.228s
  user	0m0.152s
  sys	0m0.019s
  
  $ time ruby bin/fri -f plain String > /dev/null
  
  real	0m0.147s
  user	0m0.080s
  sys	0m0.010s

fri installed with RubyGems is faster (0.228 / 0.385), fri from
the tarball ist slower (0.147 / 0.088) than or your box.

Is my box just slower than yours and is this the result of
improvements in the RubyGems-installed code?

Daniel