Why I am excited about Ruby 2.1?
summary
Ruby 2.1 ships a generational GC that cuts tail latency for the 90th and 99th percentiles while out‑of‑the‑box memory often doubles even though retained object counts drop. Bench builds from GitHub show ~5–10% throughput gains and a 42% speedup on a large spec suite. New runtime hooks and a heap dump API plus tools like abtrace, a memory profiler gem and flame graphs let teams find leaks, trace allocations to file and line, and try jemalloc or an out‑of‑band GC gem to reduce long‑term RSS.
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:08Ruby gems
- 2:50Ruby 21 issues
- 3:27Discourse bench
- 8:06Minor GC
- 8:42Major GC
- 10:51GitHub
- 12:09My recommendation
- 12:55Bench performance
- 13:08Outofband GC
- 15:08Unicorns
- 16:15Extra flag
- 17:51Saving memory
- 18:41Speeding up spec suites
- 20:20RBTrace gem
- 21:10Annotator
- 22:21Apache Bench
- 22:53Leaking Objects
- 23:23Heap Dump
- 24:14Memory Profiling
- 24:54Report Cards
- 28:04String F
- 28:28ActiveRecord
- 29:14String Freeze
- 30:41New hooks
- 31:24String scrub
- 32:42The future
- 33:32The good news
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