Track down Memory leaks in a Ruby Script

Question

Hello!

I have created a Ruby XMPP Framework called babylon. I have then created a few applications with it and even though they run pretty smoothly, it seems that they're eating my computer memory bit by bit.

I suspected leaks, so first, I added this at some point in my code :

puts `ps -o rss= -p #{Process.pid}`.to_i

As suspected, the output kept increasing... slowly, but surely.

I tried to hunt the leaks with Dike, like explained here.

Unfortunetely, Dike was not able to detect any leak. Even after it ran for a quite long time, it still returns the same objects.

So, how can I be sure that my framework is leaking, and not just taking some RAM until some maximum point and then starting to release it?

And then, how can I actually track the leaks and fix them?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

I've heard good things about the Ruby Memory Tracking API but it is not free.

There is also a useful blog post for using valgrind to find ruby memory leaks.

There are other solutions for Ruby on Rails but it doesn't seem like you are using rails at all.