From: Jano Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2008-03-02T04:26:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Memory Allocation in low RAM environments

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 7:38 PM, John Snowdon <j.p.snowdon@ncl.ac.uk> wrote:
> Reading up on garbage collection and memory allocation in Ruby and I've
>  just learned of the fact that Ruby allocates a minimum heap of
>  8000kbytes.
>
>  Is there anything I need to be wary of if reducing this to something
>  much smaller, like say between 512-1024kbytes?
>
>  I think that minimum heap size is causing me problems in my Arm-WinCE
>  environment where we get approx 38000-40000kbytes to use from the
>  initial 64megabytes, once the OS and framebuffer has taken its share.
>
>  -John

In the gc.c file you'll find:

#ifndef GC_MALLOC_LIMIT
#if defined(MSDOS) || defined(__human68k__)
#define GC_MALLOC_LIMIT 200000
#else
#define GC_MALLOC_LIMIT 8000000
#endif
#endif

You may try playing with that number. Warning: I know almost nothing
about ruby internals,
so I won't tell you the possible consequences, nor the sensible lower
bound for the number.

Jano