The development environment pretty much reloads everything from disc on each request (as opposed to production where most classes/views are cached), so it is "normal" that it's slow. I'd consider something around up to 2-3 seconds to be "normal".

Yes that sounds pretty much like the time it takes for me.

Ok no problem, any suggestions on how you do your development so you don't spend that much time waiting? I'm thinking I might not be approaching my problem the right way ... all I want to do is create some plugins don't need to modify anything from the core

Well, there's 2 things you can do:

- Configure your local production environment to be as log-verbose as development and just use the production environment for browser-testing, note though that the whole reloading you get in development also applies to plugins, so that will mean cycling (stopping + starting) your rails server each time you've done changes,
- Use tests and forego the browser-testing part (or at least most of it).

I generally use tests, development mode for prototyping/trying stuff, and production mode with the same DB as development for more "final" testing.

Thanks for the tips :) I'll give it a try!