I never use ri for gems.

I always found ri to just really too slow to be of any use, at least on of the machines I use and everytime I install a new gem it seems to slow everything down to a halt.

1rl@bloodandguts:~$ sudo gem install mislav-will_paginate
2[sudo] password for rl: 
3Successfully installed mislav-will_paginate-2.3.11
41 gem installed
5Installing ri documentation for mislav-will_paginate-2.3.11...
6Updating ri class cache with 9654 classes...
7Installing RDoc documentation for mislav-will_paginate-2.3.11...

If you never use the ri documenation for gems, you can turn this off in your ~/.gemrc file by adding the gem line.

 1--- 
 2gem: --no-ri
 3:benchmark: false
 4:verbose: true
 5:backtrace: false
 6:update_sources: true
 7:sources: 
 8- http://gems.rubyforge.org/
 9- http://gems.github.com
10:bulk_threshold: 1000

I think perhaps I need to do a gem cleanup to really clear out anything I’m not using and remove the gems I installed over a year ago for testing and never use.