From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-11-10T13:58:25+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Lionel Bouton wrote:
> 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.

Sounds to me like you're building a data structure in RAM to avoid 
making your RDBMS earn its keep. ;) But seriously, unless you can 
restructure your application so it doesn't keep a lot of stuff in RAM, 
you're probably doomed to throw hardware at it. In other words, hard 
drives are where data that must live for extended periods (or forever) 
belong, *explicitly* filed there by your application code, not 
*implicitly* filed there by the swapper. RAM is for volatile information 
that is being used and re-used frequently.