Also, with eager loading, the browser hangs after the console says completed and doesn't updated for an age (about 6 seconds).
As I found out today, it is probably Bullet itself causing this. The reason is because it inserts a middleware which has to go through and analyse your queries before the browser can receive the page. So conceivably any change in your queries may influence how fast Bullet does its thing.
By removing Bullet in one of my apps, I got rid of the extra delay on one of my slow pages, and also reduced actual reported rendering time by a full second.
So when you do your comparison, do it with Bullet disabled (either in your configuration or by removing from Gemfile temporarily and running bundle
). It's still a valuable tool, but apparently for some apps it might be a good idea to only enable it periodically when you're trying to optimize things.