Large increase in free memory slots after upgrading Rails app to Ruby 2.6.1

[nickw...@gmail.com]

Hoping to direct some people to this question on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54815058/why-might-average-free-memory-slots-dramatically-increase-after-upgrading-to-rub

After upgrading to Ruby 2.6.1 I noticed a large increase in free memory slots with a consistent pattern for them tapering off (graphs in StackOverflow question).  I don't notice and performance impact, but interested in why it might be happening.

Thanks!

[Phil Edelbrock]

Do you have JIT enabled or not? There's a lot of potential for JIT, but it is very experimental for now, and not so good for Rails yet. Otherwise it sounds like a garbage collection (GC) issue.

I would recommend reading this:

https://pragprog.com/book/adrpo/ruby-performance-optimization

There's some good stuff there on how to bench and tune things (albeit, slightly out of date).

A few simple examples is to use direct SQL queries when possible instead of full model loads, and using the BANG (!) methods when possible (in other words, using, say "reject!" instead of "myvar = myvar.reject ...")

Hope this helps.


Phil