From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2007-08-14T18:28:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Why don't Ruby libraries share memory?

On Aug 13, 2007, at 20:14, Daniel DeLorme wrote:
> Matt Harvey wrote:
>> Sorry, I started talking about Rails again. The question is not  
>> about Rails. The questions are: Is there any way we can have  
>> shared Ruby libraries without turning the relevant code into a C  
>> extension? Is it necessary that code be compiled to be put into  
>> shared memory by the OS?
>
> The problem goes further than that. Even if you were to load your  
> libs in one process and then fork off worker processes (using copy- 
> on-write to share loaded code), the gargabe collector writes to  
> *every* page in memory when doing a garbage collecting run, thus  
> negating the benefits of COW. It's fixed in 1.9, thankfully, but  
> 1.8 is going to be a memory hog no matter which way you look at it.

For .so files, no, for .rb files, yes.

--
Poor workers blame their tools. Good workers build better tools. The
best workers get their tools to do the work for them. -- Syndicate Wars