From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2009-03-30T21:48:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbols garbage collector in Ruby1.9, fixed?

On Mar 30, 2009, at 7:16 AM, Brian Candler wrote:

> Iņaki Baz Castillo wrote:
>> I could use strings as keys instead of symbols, but I've checked that
>> getting a Hash entry is ~25% faster using Symbols.
>>
>> The problem is that I could receive custom headers so for each one a
>> new Symbol would be created. An attacker could send lots of custom
>> headers to fill the server memory and cause a denial of service.
>>
>> Perhaps this is solved in Ruby 1.9? any suggestion on it? Thanks a  
>> lot.
>
> It's not "solved" in 1.9, because this is intentional and necessary
> behaviour.

Dave Thomas seems to have thought this was going away:

http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/05/ruby-symbols-in.html

James Edward Gray II