From: Jason DiCioccio <jd@...>
Date: 2003-11-08T03:44:59+09:00
Subject: Long-running daemon acquiring giant memory footprint

I have written a long-running daemon in ruby to handle dynamic DNS updates. 
I have just recently moved it from ruby 1.6 to ruby 1.8 and updated all of 
its libraries to their latest versions (it uses dbi and dbd-postgres).  The 
problem i am having now is that it appears to start out using a sane amount 
of memory (around 8mb) but then by the next day around the same time will 
be using close to 200MB for the ruby interpreter alone.  The daemon code 
itself is 100% ruby so I don't understand how this leak is happening.  Are 
there any dangerous code segments I should look for that could make it do 
this?  The only thing I could think of is the fact that every returned 
object from a sql query is .dup'd since ruby dbi passes a reference. 
However, these should be getting swept up automatically by the garbage 
collector.  This is driving me nuts and I would love it if someone could 
point me in the right direction..

Thanks!
-JD-