Shopify's team contributed several performance improvements to Bundler and RubyGems. Key changes include increasing the HTTP connection pool from 1 to 5 (making downloads up to 200% faster), parallelizing git gem cloning (3x faster for 33 git gems), and removing redundant tarball integrity checks. The biggest bottleneck—native extension compilation—is addressed through cibuildgem, a new GitHub Actions-based toolchain for releasing precompiled binary gems. An internal experiment precompiling 17 of 235 gems achieved a 3.5x reduction in bundle install time (24.2s to 7.0s).
Table of contents
Faster gem downloadsHotspots and optimizationsParallel git clonesNative extensionsPrecompiled gemsIntroducing cibuildgemSort: