&gt; Removing every last bit of redundancy is nice, but it isn&#x27;t going to save me that much. Maybe it&#x27;ll save me a couple tens of MBs of disk space, and a couple of MBs of RAM per process. But if that costs me a few hours of work, it isn&#x27;t worth it.<p>I don&#x27;t care about the disk space and RAM at all, but every additional C extension (like EventMachine) means one more dependency that can break when I update a) my OS or compiler, b) Ruby, c) Rubygems, d) Bundler or e) Rails. Most of these updates have to be installed immediately for security reasons.
I absolutely love Ruby as a language, but with Rails I feel I spend half my time in the terminal, trying to fix `gem install` incantations just to keep things running :(