Democratizing the Fight Against Ruby Memory Bloat
Hongli Lai • June 09, 2021 • online

Ruby apps can use a lot of memory, but not for the reasons you think. I've discovered that as much as 70% of the memory usage is not caused by Ruby, but by the system's memory allocator! The good news is that there are technically simple solutions. So why isn't everybody using them? That's the bad news: they're cumbersome to deploy. We can say that the solutions are not "democratized".

I'm on a mission to allow everyone to easily get rid of Ruby memory bloat. In this talk I'll explain where Ruby memory bloat comes from, what the solutions are, and how I'm working on democratizing the solutions in the form of Fullstaq Ruby. I will also talk about my efforts to make Fullstaq Ruby a sustainable open source project.

This talk was delivered at EMEA on Rails, a virtual mega-meetup which took place on June 9, 2021.

EMEA on Rails 2021