From: Yorick Peterse <yorickpeterse@...>
Date: 2013-02-06T23:22:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:51911] Re: [ruby-trunk - Feature #7791][Open] Let symbols be garbage collected

Garbage collecting Symbols would most likely do more harm than good.
Sure, a ddos based on Symbols may no longer be possible but there's a
big chance it will introduce a significant performance penalty as a
result of having to create new Symbol instances every time a set of is
gabrage collected.

I also feel that garbage collecting symbols is the wrong way to solve
the problem. The problem is that the code you're using blindly converts
user based input to Symbols. The obvious solution to this problem would
be to simply stop doing that.

To give you an idea of how many Symbols there are by default you can run
the following:

     puts Symbol.all_symbols.size

For me this results in 1859. However, when running this in a Pry session
(just to give an idea of how big this number can be) this results in
6823.

Yorick