From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2005-10-16T05:01:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Help! define_method leaking procs...


On Oct 15, 2005, at 11:36 AM, Jamis Buck wrote:

> A plea for help, here... The rails core team is hacking like mad  
> this weekend at RubyConf, and my assignment has been to track down  
> and fix the memory leak in development mode. Here's what is known  
> about this leak:
>
> 1. It only occurs in development mode (production mode does not  
> exhibit the leak)
> 2. It only occurs under FastCGI (running under WEBrick does not  
> exhibit the leak)
> 3. The leak is due to an accumulation of Proc objects used with  
> define_method, primarily in ActiveRecord (the define_method's in  
> question are used to create the dynamic "has_one", "belongs_to",  
> "has_many", and "habtm" accessors). The leak may also be due to  
> define_method's used in ActionMailer, as well.

Someone on IRC made this claim a while ago so I looked into it. Doing  
tens of thousands of define_methods certainly increased the memory  
footprint, but explicit calls to GC.start every 100 calls or so kept  
it to a bare minimum. I don't think it is a real leak, but I could be  
wrong. I can talk to you about it in more depth if you grab me later  
today or tomorrow.