Assets loading slowly in development

Question

Each page request in my app pulls down about 30 assets (JavaScripts and images), which is both third-party stuff in vendors/ and app/ stuff. Of course, all the JavaScript is combined and minified in production, so it's fine there, but in development, it's really slow. Like 8 seconds to load the page and will only get worse. Is this normal and what can be done to speed it up?

I tried moving images from assets/ to public/, but it serves them just as slowly. About 3-4 files a second.

This is happening on a fast Macbook Pro with both WEBrick and Unicorn.

Answer 1

Turning off asset debugging should improve the speed a bit.

#development.rb
config.assets.debug = false