Excessive stat calls on /etc/localtime in Rails Application

I just straced my Rails-App and it produces a lot of

stat("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2309, ...}) = 0

Calls (really a lot!). In 开发者_JAVA百科other contexts I've read that this is because the Timezone is not set. Is there a way to "fix" this?

Best,

Tobias

It's not a ruby issue but rather a C / Linux issue: Setting "TZ" ENV-Var will lead to no more stat calls on etc/localtime. It wont have significant performance impacts though:

# irb
require 'benchmark'
Benchmark.measure { 10_000_000.times { Time.now } }
 =>  17.880000   0.540000  18.420000 ( 21.535307)

# same with TZ=CET irb
 =>  18.040000   0.550000  18.590000 ( 20.892542)   

As @fabio said, you should report this to the Rails forums or mailinglist, because its probably a bug.

However, to set the time zone, in your config/environment.rb:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.time_zone = "Central Time (US & Canada)"
end

you can get available time zones with rake time:zones:us, rake time:zones:local, or rake time:zones:all (depending on where you are in the world.)