Memory leak in Rails apps

Ruby
1

We have developed rails reports and deployed in server, report have some
hierarchy levels…

Initially we have less volume of data in database table and report is
running with fine performance…

after few months,reports get very slower, we thought that this could be
because of data increased in database table ( nearly 11 lakhs of records
in table)…

Then i created index and report has shown better performance than
old…

after 1 year, again reports are showing poor performance…
So we have decided to monitor memory related issues and used ‘top’ and
‘free’ commands to monitor memory…

as per our analysis,

  1. at start, used memory was 100MB and free memory was 500MB.

  2. When i continuously used complex report(i visit some hierarchy level
    or sub links) ,at first level shows good performance…then i move
    forward to next and next level reports the performance get very poor.

  3. The free memory was reduced to 150MB…used memory was increased to
    400MB…

  4. the free memory is not released even after the report shows result…

So we suggest to release used memory by forcing garbage collection
manually…

Kindly tell me how to call garbage collection manually or any other
ideas are also welcome…

Thanks…

2

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Manivannanj J.
[email protected] wrote:

Kindly tell me how to call garbage collection manually or any other
ideas are also welcome…

Thanks…

You may start garbage collection manually in Ruby by calling GC.start,
however on a production server it may be a good idea to restart your
server every so often (there are things that the garbage collector
does not collect, like symbols for instance). Deployment products
like Passenger have methods for automatically restarting a server
process after a certain amount of time or number of requests, you may
want to look into that.

-Jonathan N.

3

  1. When i continuously used complex report(i visit some hierarchy level
    or sub links) ,at first level shows good performance…then i move
    forward to next and next level reports the performance get very poor.

  2. The free memory was reduced to 150MB…used memory was increased to
    400MB…

  3. the free memory is not released even after the report shows result…

So we suggest to release used memory by forcing garbage collection
manually…

I have added some GC suggestions to the bottom of

http://wiki.github.com/rdp/ruby_tutorials_core/gc

That may be of interest to you.
Your problem is actually a common one.
Cheers!
-rp

4

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Manivannanj J. <
[email protected]> wrote:

Then i created index and report has shown better performance than
2) When i continuously used complex report(i visit some hierarchy level

Kindly tell me how to call garbage collection manually or any other
ideas are also welcome…

Thanks…

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

One of the talks at Ruby Midwest is going to be on Memprof. Here’s it’s
abstract:

Memprof: the ruby level memory profiler

Aman G. & Joe Damato – Ever wondered why your ruby script uses so
much
RAM? Tired of having god restart your rails app every few hours?

This talk will introduce memprof, a ruby level memory profiler. We’ll
demo
memprof on a variety of real-world examples, including some popular open
source projects. Along the way, we’ll learn how the ruby VM manages
memory,
why garbage collection has such a large impact on ruby’s performance and
some common ways to reduce the memory impact of your ruby applications.

Even if you can’t attend the conference, you might check out Memprof
anyway,
it sounds as though it might help you identify the cause of your issues
so
that you can fix the source of the problem. Note: I haven’t personally
played with it (yet).