From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2007-01-04T00:45:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Memory Leak Madness

On 1/3/07, Brandon Casci <brandon@loudcity.net> wrote:
> I'm having one hell of a time trying to find and stop a memory leak in a
> ruby daemon. It starts off using a tiny 14 MB of RAM, and 150+MB after a
> day. I've read through many forum and blog posts, and tried several
> profilers. I don't see anything unusual.
>
> I even tried this guy
> http://scottstuff.net/blog/articles/2006/08/17/memory-leak-profiling-with-rails
>
> That showed my overall object count going up and down as normal, but
> memory was not being released as objects came and went.
>
> I've gone through my code made sure I'm squashing any unused objects.
> Well...I set them to nil, I just guessed that would help. I'm also
> calling .clear on any arrays and hashes. I noticed this helps with
> garbage collection. I also added a thread that runs does nothing but
> sleep and run garbage collection every 5 minutes, although I'm pretty
> sure this isn't helping much.
>
> All I've managed to greatly slow the memory leak.  Before the daemon
> would consume 100+ MB in a few hours.
>
> There are two things my daemon makes heavy use of that is out of
> control, hpricot and dbi (talking to ms sql server). I suspect one or
> both of these guys may be my problem. I'll write into both projects for
> advice, but is there anything else I can do so ruby will let go of
> unused objects?

Try loading this library when you daemon starts up:
http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/programming/fastthread-0-6-1.html

DBI almost certainly makes use of locking, and fastthread cleans that
up significantly.

Just a thought.