> Disabling GC around the requests would guarantee that the size of the > Mongrel process will balloon to the size of all objects combined in > the most heavyweight request.
Definitely a trade-off between RAM and CPU. I would say that those who are CPU not RAM bound would be most interested in it > Remember that the Ruby heap never > returns space to the OS. (well it does if you're extremely lucky and a heap chunk happens to be entirely freed of its ruby objects, but, since the heap chunks are allocated in larger and larger blocks, this is unlikely and, as you noted, probably close to 'never') > As soon as you re-enable the GC, the entire > Ruby heap (now 4-5x bigger than it normally would be) will get paged > back in to physical RAM. Right. No savings in terms of RAM being swapped out (except using the method you suggested below). I believe the main advantage to GC'ing 'only every so often' or 'once per request' would be not that you use less RAM, but that you use keep all that (bloated) RAM in memory and traverse it far less frequently. So it "might" save CPU at the expense of RAM. The overhead of mongrel +rails setup is (for me) around 40MB. So basically ruby, every 8MB of allocated memory, is traversing the 48MB of memory, which sets it down to 40MB. So for it to create 50MB of memory (however many requests that is) it will traverse ~5*50MB memory = 250MB. If you leave it to only GC after ~40MB have been allocated, it traverses 100MB once (and sets it back down to 40). As you noted it does use more RAM, and none of that RAM can healthfully reside in swap. Significant, at least for those with lots of RAM? I don't know. > As I understand it, the point of disabling the GC is to allow part of > the heap to swap out. This has no benefit if you enable the GC > after--you have to disable the GC, Kernel.fork, run the request, let > the request thread die, and then re-enable the heap in the parent. That might be a quite useful RAM-wise--its like 'ignoring' the garbage generated with a request and deserves consideration. Nice. > I'm doubtful that there is much benefit but it deserves some testing. > > Incidentally the Ruby heap (and the GC) should have nothing to do with > Imagemagick. Extensions that use malloc() are a totally different > scenario. IIRC when garbage collection begins it also requests the extensions to clean themselves up, too, though I'll admit I never saw or understood how this is accomplished within gc.c. It's possible that it just called 'cleanup' on extensions' (now old) ruby allocated objects, which are linked to their own malloc'ed objects and know how to clean them up. > Evan Thanks Evan. -Roger -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. _______________________________________________ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
