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The closing keynote of GoRuCo 2018, delivered by Aaron Patterson, focuses on techniques for analyzing and reducing memory usage in Ruby. Patterson, who is also known as Tenderlove and works at GitHub, shares insights gathered from his experience and specific patches he created to enhance Ruby's memory performance.  
  
Key points discussed include:  
- **Introduction & Personal Background**: Patterson shares his excitement for the event, his history with Ruby, and the significance of GoRuCo in his career as the first regional Ruby conference he attended.  
- **Memory Usage Overview**: Understanding memory usage is crucial; Patterson discusses MRI Ruby's structure and methods to monitor memory allocation. He presents two main approaches: reading code (ineffective) and utilizing malloc stack tracing, which is preferred for deeper insights into memory usage patterns.  
- **Tools for Memory Profiling**: He highlights the importance of tracking allocations made by the garbage collector and malloc, suggesting tools such as the allocation tracer gem and malloc stack logging, particularly on macOS, to analyze memory usage effectively.  
- **Loaded Features Cache**: Patterson explains a notable optimization he worked on regarding the loaded features cache which tracks required files in memory. He redesigned the cache, streamlining it to reduce overhead and achieving up to 50% reduction in memory usage by minimizing unnecessary object allocations.  
- **Direct Instruction Sequence Marking**: The second patch he discusses relates to Ruby's virtual machine (VM) architecture. He emphasizes the dilemma of string duplication during execution and explains how marking objects properly leads to better memory management by avoiding duplication when pushing objects onto the stack.  
  
In conclusion, Patterson asserts that these optimizations contribute significantly to Ruby 2.6's memory efficiency and encourages developers to upgrade to leverage these improvements. Through thorough profiling and targeted optimizations, Ruby can maintain lower memory usage while ensuring stability and consistency in applications. He thanks the organizers and the community for the opportunity to present this knowledge, marking an inspiring end to the last GoRuCo conference.

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