> From the article, the issue is that the Ruby GC is triggered on total number of objects, and not total amount of used memory.
Which, it should be noted, has actually always been a bit of a problem with Ruby's GC. Particularly when it comes to C extensions that can't or won't use certain patterns to hint to the VM about how much memory they're really using.
I remember a really common memory issue with ImageMagick's extension along these lines back in the 1.8.x days. ImageMagick allocates huge objects and gave the Ruby VM very little insight into that fact because it used its own malloc. You'd wind up with a perfectly normal, in terms of memory use, Ruby app that didn't trigger GCs often enough and the IM objects wouldn't get cleaned up in a timely way, so it looked like you had a huge leak. You'd then spend days trying to figure it out.
Which, it should be noted, has actually always been a bit of a problem with Ruby's GC. Particularly when it comes to C extensions that can't or won't use certain patterns to hint to the VM about how much memory they're really using.
I remember a really common memory issue with ImageMagick's extension along these lines back in the 1.8.x days. ImageMagick allocates huge objects and gave the Ruby VM very little insight into that fact because it used its own malloc. You'd wind up with a perfectly normal, in terms of memory use, Ruby app that didn't trigger GCs often enough and the IM objects wouldn't get cleaned up in a timely way, so it looked like you had a huge leak. You'd then spend days trying to figure it out.