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Curious Case of Ruby's memory
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Hemant Kumar
September 30, 2014
Programming
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Curious Case of Ruby's memory
A roundup of Ruby memory profiling and GC
Hemant Kumar
September 30, 2014
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Transcript
Curious case of Ruby’s memory
Garbage Collection
How it used to work
Mark and Sweep
None
Generational GC
Most objects die Young
None
active_users[user.id] = user Old gen object New object
Bug!
None
None
memcpy(RARRAY_PTR(ary)[i], src, array_len(src)) Copy into ruby array Object in old
gen
None
None
Key take aways
Don’t use low level access for Ruby DS in C
extensions, such RARRAY_PTR
If your C-ext holds ref. to a Ruby object you
need Write Barriers for taking adv. of Gen. GC.
GC Tuning via ENV variables
Part 2
Memory Profiling Ruby apps
None
Thanks to Ruby 2.1
RBKit
None
None
None
None
RBkit Team • Emil • Kashyap • Yuva • Hemant
And
http://codemancers.com
C is what Linus Torvalds wrote.
About RBKit • A low overhead Ruby Profiler built for
MRI. • Written almost completely in C.
RBKit • A Desktop application • A Ruby gem
RBKit • Gather and send all profile data via ZeroMQ
to connected client (Desktop app) • Uses msgpack as serialization format.
Advantage RBKit • ZeroMQ manages separate IO threads for sending
and receiving messages. • Msgpack serialisation is fast. • A profiler that can be used in production!
Using it ! require 'rbkit' ! Rbkit.start_profiling
RbkitApp
RbkitApp • Cross platform - Qt/C++ • Webkit/Javascript for rendering
charts. • Sqlite
Why Qt/C++? • All heavy lifting is done client side.
• Parsing and processing heap dump of millions of objects. • We can still render certain pages/data using plain HTML via Qt Webkit bridge.
Tools used • Valgrind • leaks (Try this command on
OSX now!)
RBkit Status Report • Memory Profiling works (Demo) • CPU
Profiling is in works. • Open source
RbkitApp Demo
GC tuning visualizations
RUBY_GC_HEAP_INIT_SLOTS
RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_FACTOR
Ruby Heap vs C heap • Rvalue size = 40
bytes • If Object can’t fit that size, ruby uses ruby_xmalloc() • which is wrapper around malloc()
RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT
Thank you! • https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit • https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit- client • http://thorstenball.com/blog/2014/03/12/ watching-understanding-ruby-2.1-garbage-
collector/ • http://tmm1.net/ruby21-rgengc/
@gnufied http://www.codemancers.com Hemant Kumar