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I wasn't using ritz-nrepl before, and nrepl took around 10 sec which is long but still bearable since I don't restart it that often.

When I tried out ritz-repl, it took nearly 30s to boot, and consumes around 1.3G memory. This makes me reluctant to use it.

I even threw in a SSD hoping it can increase the speed, because I heard someone mention that he "hardly notice the lein repl startup time" using ubuntu + ssd. But I can't tell the difference myself between ssd and hdd. I don't know if I did something wrong or if its just a myth.

LoveProgramming
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    I only fire it up when I need heavy variable introspection. The rest of the time I use the normal nrepl. My userexperience is that ritz-nrepl is far from mature. I am using Fedora+SSD and that's just the way it is, 30 sec is totally normal for me. Also, since I have to deactivate auto-completion (ac-nrepl) globally (because otherwise emacs freezes) it is not really attractive for most time of the development workflow. – Leon Grapenthin May 15 '13 at 04:56
  • Thanks for the info! BTW, hows your raw nrepl startup time? I got 6s with no dependencies and around 15s with 7 or so. – LoveProgramming May 15 '13 at 17:42
  • Yes I didn't measure it but this is about it. For most development I usually get through using this macro to get introspection in the repl: (defmacro dbg [x] `(let [x# ~x] (println "dbg:" '~x "=" x#) x#)) – Leon Grapenthin May 15 '13 at 22:24

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There might be ways to reduce the startup time of an nrepl server that includes ritz but for the most part you will be stuck with at least the 10 seconds it takes to boot up the jvm on your machine. For me that is kind of an unacceptable delay when doing interactive development.

As an alternative you can use a smarter code reloading approach using the clojure.tools.namespace library. It basically keeps a dependency graph in memory and reloads only those namespaces that have been changed since you last refresh.

This will work out of the box for some but not all Clojure code. See the 'Preparing Your Application' section of the readme for more info on those edge cases to avoid.

Hope this helps!

Dirk Geurs
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