Standup 11/10/2008: Memory profiling tools for Ruby

edit Posted by Brandon Keene on Thursday November 13, 2008 at 01:16AM

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"We're having an issue with a long running Ruby process consuming too much memory and failing. What tools are available for finding and patching Ruby memory leaks?"

Several tools were suggested:

  • Valgrind - Considered very powerful but difficult to use. "It will do what you want if you can figure out how to properly ask it to do so."
  • BleakHouse - Ruby specific leak detection. It's available as a gem called "bleak_house"
  • Leaks - This is native to OSX. The Google Web Toolkit uses this for leak detection.
  • DTrace - Also a native OSX tool. There was a RailsConf presentation on Everyday DTrace on OSX.

"Rake will often silently 'fail' when running RSpec. It will not blow up but rather silently quits in the middle of the suite. This seems to happen intermittently, usually on the first run of our test suite. If we run the suite again, it works."

It was suggested that this might be a Rake version issue since there have been other test suite problems with Rake 0.8.3. Though, this particular type of problem was not identical to previous Rake versioning issues and may be something altogether different.

Keep reading for a more detailed description of this weird RSpec + Rake issue.

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