From: Tim Pease <tim.pease@...>
Date: 2007-11-02T01:09:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Garbage collection and symbols

On Oct 31, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Hendrik Louw wrote:

> I stumbled accross this link
> http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/01/20/13-ways-of-looking- 
> at-a-ruby-symbol#11
> . This is about the only thing I can find on the subject. I want to  
> find
> out if symbols ever get freed during the lifetime of a ruby program.

Symbols are never freed during the lifetime of a ruby program. Once  
they are allocated in the symbol hash table, they are there forever.

If you want to bring your machine to a crawl, run this little ruby  
script ....


ruby -e '(2**24).times {|ii| "a#{ii}".intern}'


Blessings,
TwP