rake assets:precompile is slooooow. Any way to speed it up?

Question

I have a Rails 3.2 app running on Heroku, and it uses CKEditor. Now, CKEditor is a pretty large collection of files and folders, and is probably the biggest contributor to the time it takes to precompile assets. A regular push to Heroku takes well over a minute on the assets:precompile step.

So I now precompile locally, and only when I've made edits, before I push to Heroku, to shorten deploy times. However, my poor old Windows laptop easily breaks 15 minutes for rake assets:precompile. This makes it a huge pain to make minor edits or additions to js or css files.

I do have config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false as required by Heroku docs. But I'm pretty sure the real time hog is compression, i.e. Uglifier.

Does anyone have a suggestion to how I can remedy this? Am I simply doing it wrong? Is there a way to only compile changed files? Could/should I move CKEditor directly to the public dir to avoid precompiling?

Answer 1

You can try to load the assets only on the changed files which would speed up compiling process by a huge margin. You can easily do so using turbo-sprockets-gem.

https://github.com/ndbroadbent/turbo-sprockets-rails3

The documentation is pretty straight forward. Hope this helps.