Using Bumbler to reduce runtime dependencies

A few weeks ago, I found an interesting project called Bumbler opens a new window . If your project uses Bundler, Bumbler shows you your project’s largest dependencies. When you find yourself staring at the screen after running bundle exec rails c, you may want to give this tool a try.

Using it is simple. Add gem 'bumbler' to your Gemfile under the development group, run bundle, and you’re good to go. When you run bundle exec bumbler you will see a progress bar and a detail of the dependencies which took the longest to load. Here’s an example of a project’s development dependencies:

➜  git:(master) ✗ bundle exec bumbler
[#################################################                             ]
(49/65) travis-lint...
Slow requires:
    110.21  render_anywhere
    147.33  nokogiri
    173.83  haml
    179.62  sass-rails
    205.04  delayed_job_active_record
    286.76  rails
    289.36  mail
    291.98  capistrano
    326.05  delayed_job
    414.27  pry
    852.13  salesforce_bulk_api

As you can see, one of the gems takes almost 1 second to load on my system, and removing it decreases the time it takes for bundle exec rails c to load by 1 second. It’s not a lot, but consider every Rake task you run which depends on the environment will take 1 less second to get started.

After we get rid of salesforce_bulk_api and render_anywhere and manually call require on them when needed, the load time looks like this:

➜  git:(master) ✗ bundle exec bumbler
[#################################################                             ]
(47/65) fog-aws...
Slow requires:
    167.50  sass-rails
    188.87  nokogiri
    218.49  haml
    230.10  capistrano
    253.77  delayed_job_active_record
    284.26  mail
    320.19  delayed_job
    365.67  pry
    464.09  rails

Your tests can also benefit from this, as you may find gems that you do not need to have in the test environment. Capistrano is one example, usually you want to have it load only in development, not in test nor production.

One caveat worth mentioning: you need to take a close look at your loaded gem’s dependencies when removing them. For example, capistrano depends on net-ssh and net-scp. If you remove capistrano from test or production, you won’t be able to use Net::SSH or Net::SCP unless you manually add the net-ssh and net-scp dependencies back in your Gemfile, as you were relying on them implicitly via Capistrano.