Speeding up Rails 3.2.1 Development Environment - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I'm running a rather large project in Development and its just too slow. I believe the reason is because on each request Rails reloads every class. This project literally has hundreds of classes so the response time is too slow.
How can I speed up my development environment?
I'm running Apache server, the latest version of Passenger, RVM ruby 1.9.2-p180 (which I'm more or less locked into the ruby version).
development.rb:
# (Development-only) what is our localhost called?
LOCALDOMAIN = File.read("/etc/context_dev_host").strip
# Don't verify SSL connections.
OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
SMSAdmin::Application.configure do
config.cache_classes = false # reload on every request
config.whiny_nils = true # Log error messages when you accidentally call methods on nil.
config.consider_all_requests_local = true # Show full error reports and disable caching
config.action_controller.perform_caching = false # Show full error reports and disable caching
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false # Don't care if the mailer can't send
config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => "#{APP_HOSTNAME}" } # default url_for :host
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
# Distributed Assets will expect an asset host for path resolution:
config.action_controller.asset_host = Proc.new do |source, request|
ssl = request && request.ssl?
hash = false
subd = true
host = ( hash ? "a#{source.hash % 4}." : "" ) + ( subd && request && request.host || APP_HOSTNAME )
( ssl ? "https://" : "http://" ) + host
end
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :sendmail
config.after_initialize do
# Custom developer files (generally to support Rake tasks, where we don't have a request to determine the FB API Key)
dh = File.read("/etc/context_dev_host").strip.split(".").first
df = File.expand_path("../#{dh}.rb", __FILE__)
if File.exists?(df) then
silence_warnings do
require(df)
end
end
end
# Do not compress assets
config.assets.compress = false
# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = false
config.assets.digest = false
# Raise exception on mass assignment protection for Active Record models
config.active_record.mass_assignment_sanitizer = :strict
# Log the query plan for queries taking more than this (works
# with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL)
config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds = 0.5
end