From: Igal Koshevoy <igal@...>
Date: 2008-07-02T23:55:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.9.0/1.8.7/1.8.6/1.8.5 new releases (Security Fix)

Doug Alcorn wrote:
> Our production Rails environment has been having some memory problems 
> for a while.  Once a week or our mongrel daemons swell in memory usage 
> and it pushes beyond what our box can comfortably handle.  We're hunting 
> for the root cause, but a simple restart of the mongrel processes clears 
> it up for another week or so.
>
> We installed the smartleaf patched ruby on our production environment on 
> Monday.  Since that time we had our processes balloon at least a dozen 
> times in two days.  After reverting the patch to ruby it has returned to 
> normal.  I don't know if our situation is a corner case or not.  I'm 
> just wanting to let folks know who are trying to decide what to do that 
> we've had problems with the smartleaf patch.
>   
Thanks for reporting that, Doug.

Can you or one of your engineers try to figure out how to trigger this 
memory ballooning problem? That'd be really valuable to the Ruby community.

The Smartleaf patch doesn't introduce any new code, merely reverts some 
problematic refactoring, so whatever is making your problem worse may 
very likely still be in the latest Ruby code that the maintainers plan 
to publish soon, so it'd be best to identify the cause ASAP.

-igal