Finding the cause of a memory leak in Ruby

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It looks like you are entering The Lost World here. I don’t think the problem is with c-bindings in racc either.

Ruby memory management is both elegant and cumbersome. It stores objects (named RVALUEs) in so-called heaps of size of approx 16KB. On a low level, RVALUE is a c-struct, containing a union of different standard ruby object representations.

So, heaps store RVALUE objects, which size is not more than 40 bytes. For such objects as String, Array, Hash etc. this means that small objects can fit in the heap, but as soon as they reach a threshold, an extra memory outside of the Ruby heaps will be allocated.

This extra memory is flexible; is will be freed as soon as an object became GC’ed. That’s why your testcase with big_string shows the memory up-down behaviour:

def report
  puts 'Memory ' + `ps ax -o pid,rss | grep -E "^[[:space:]]*#{$$}"`
          .strip.split.map(&:to_i)[1].to_s + 'KB'
end
report
big_var = " " * 10000000
report
big_var = nil 
report
ObjectSpace.garbage_collect
sleep 1
report
# ⇒ Memory 11788KB
# ⇒ Memory 65188KB
# ⇒ Memory 65188KB
# ⇒ Memory 11788KB

But the heaps (see GC[:heap_length]) themselves are not released back to OS, once acquired. Look, I’ll make a humdrum change to your testcase:

- big_var = " " * 10000000
+ big_var = 1_000_000.times.map(&:to_s)

And, voilá:

# ⇒ Memory 11788KB
# ⇒ Memory 65188KB
# ⇒ Memory 65188KB
# ⇒ Memory 57448KB

The memory is not released back to OS anymore, because each element of the array I introduced suits the RVALUE size and is stored in the ruby heap.

If you’ll examine the output of GC.stat after the GC was run, you’ll find that GC[:heap_used] value is decreased as expected. Ruby now has a lot of empty heaps, ready.

The summing up: I don’t think, the c code leaks. I think the problem is within base64 representation of huge image in your css. I have no clue, what’s happening inside parser, but it looks like the huge string forces the ruby heap count to increase.

Hope it helps.

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