For the longest time I could not get Webrick to work for me. It would boot up with rails s but would take several seconds for even the default landing page of a rails app to load. It was terrible.

I resorted to using Thin as my default browser by making sure it was in all my Gem files, but I still wanted to figure out why Webrick simply wouldn’t work for me. (Truth is, Thin is a better web server, but I still wanted to get Webrick to work for me.)

Searching for “webrick slow” brought up a possible solution via Stack Overflow. Basically you change the :DoNotReverseLookup symbol in your global Webrick config from nil to true.

If you’re on OS X Lion you’ll find the Webrick configuration here:

~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p362/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/config.rb

I found the :DoNotReverseLookup configuration on line 36.

Once I made the change Webrick was screaming fast. I’m pretty happy about it.

I still haven’t found the definitive reason why this problem is occurring, but at least this change appears to fix things for me.

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Please note, depending on the version of Ruby you’re running ruby-1.9.3-p362 could be something different. Just as long as you’re changing the confg.rb file in the webrick/ directory, you should be fine.