Copying the answer from the comments (and edited question body) in order to remove this question from the “Unanswered” filter:
I tried what they recommended in this post
(Diagnosing the cause of slow view rendering),
and it worked. Asset pipeline is enabled, and page loading goes from
20-40 seconds to like 1 second. much better at least.…
Basically, it turns out the delay was being caused by
config.assets.debug = true inside of development.rb. I made it false
and it seems to be faster.The Rails guys say that enabling debug will slow down really
complicated apps, but this was just a simple tutorial app with
literally 1 model/controller/view. Anyways, I hope these performance
gains last, but it does solve my immediate problem.
~ answer per Dave Bowman