Over the past few weeks I have increasingly found myself unhappy developing Rails applications in NetBeans 6. While I was initially happy with the productivity boost from moving from writing applications in nano to using a full IDE I found myself reverting to using nano. The reason was simply that NetBeans was putting too much load on my desktop system. The system isn’t exactly slow (Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB RAM) yet when running NetBeans the system load was hovering between 4 and 5 making development tedious. Before trying NetBeans I had read a lot about various IDE’s and I decided to revisit that research. One consistent complement to Eclipse with RadRails was that the performance was snappy. I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to expand my Rails IDE experiences.