Interesting JVM Helper
My manager at The Shop forwarded something he read today about an interesting little package called drip. It's essentially something that will pre-launch a JVM instance for a set of command options so that repeated calls of the same command will not have the overhead of starting a JVM. This would be ideal for JRuby - if it was supported. Unfortunately, this is a bash script and you need to be able to hook it into the code you're using - or at least replace the java command with drip.
Sadly, JRuby hides the java command, so we can't easily replace it. The JRuby team will have to make it possible with some kind of environment variable, etc. Given that Java on most platforms I've used starts pretty nicely, I'm guessing they are not going to spend a lot of time with this. It's really a bad problem on Mac OS X, but maybe that will be changing in the future. Who knows?
But it's certainly something to hang onto and maybe it'll be useful in the future.