From: Lionel Bouton <lionel-subscription@...>
Date: 2007-11-10T09:11:26+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Roger Pack wrote the following on 09.11.2007 21:28 :
> I am thinking of doing a 'side by side' distro of Ruby that includes the
> latest SVN up's, as well as some 'fringe' best practices, like a tweaked
> GC.
> It would have the ability to do force_recycle on objects arbitrarily (at
> your own risk), and getters and setters for the GC variables (like how
> often to recycle, how close you are to the next collection, how big of
> heap blocks to use, etc.)
> and also have a GC that is write-on-copy friendly (takes barely longer,
> but doesn't dirty memory).
>
> And any other personal tweaks that people contribute.  Kind of a
> bleeding edge Ruby.
>
> Would that be useful to anyone?  Would anyone use it?
>   

Useful ? Yes it would : I have some Rails actions that eat memory quite
happily (associations with hundreds of thousands of objects which
themselves have associations on which to work...). It would help if the
ruby processes would let go of the memory or at least let it live in
swap undisturbed once the action is done.

Would I use it ? Probably, I'll have to get time to both review your
patch myself and stress-test it (I prefer to test it and understand it
first-hand because I suppose it won't be used by many). Would the patch
be easy to  understand to someone both familiar with Ruby, GC techniques
and C? Or is preliminary knowledge of Ruby's internal a must?

Regards,

Lionel