There's an old solaris rationalization: "It's not the time it takes to reboot, but how often."
I find this kind of performance regression and the blasé response extremely frustrating and disappointing. What could the MRI team be working on that's more important than fixing a bug that quadruples startup time for the most popular Ruby applications? This should be fixed in a quick patch to 1.9.2. There are tens of thousands of developers wasting oodles of man-hours frustrated with this. It's bad for Ruby and bad for Rails.
Why is this not the #1 priority for the MRI team?
This directly relates to a popular HN story from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594668 (in the sense that the solution outlined in that story has sort of been evaded by some optimizations made by Ruby core - temporarily, hopefully).