Hi,

I've been with this problem for a few weeks and I'm not sure how to sort it out.

I've got a Rails 3.1.0.rc4 application in Heroku running and I'm (trying) to serve my assets with S3.

The thing is: The way things are now, I can't disable the asset compilation in production. I understand that in order to calculate the MD5 of the assets (and so call the proper asset in my S3 bucket) they must be compiled when starting the environment, but:

• If I understand well, the assets are compiled when called from the view helper (sylesheet_link_tag or javascript_include_tag). That creates an unnecessary delay to the user that (in my case) frequently leads to a timeout (due to the 30s per request limit in Heroku).
• There is no way to disable the MD5 calculation so I can freely reference application.css and therefore not having to compile it in production every time.

This problem is particularly painful when compiling javascript since I need a javascript runtime in production (therubyracer).

As far as I know, there are only two solutions to the problem:

• Calculating the MD5 of the source files (scss, js) rather than the compiled ones. The compiled files are changed when the source files are, so that would be sufficient.
• Add a configuration option to disable the MD5 calculation somewhat.

Is there anyone with the same problem? Any thoughts?

Thanks!