(GIL).! It's a lock around the execution of Ruby code.! This means that in a multi-threaded context, only one thread can execute Ruby code at any one time.
on a 8-core machine, only one thread and one core will be busy at any given time.! The GIL exists to protect Ruby internals from race conditions that could corrupt data.! There are caveats and optimizations, but this is the gist.