Open Sourcing Shopify’s Ruby Builds | Rails at Scale

Shopify has one of the largest and highest traffic Ruby and Rails deployments in the world. We encounter bugs and performance bottlenecks in Ruby that very few other companies experience, so we’re constantly working on fixing bugs and improving performance. We’ve worked on performance features such as YJIT, Variable Width Allocation, and Object Shapes, just to name a few.However, Ruby’s release schedule is once a year, on Christmas Day. This meant that we often have to wait several months before we can experience the performance improvements that our features provide. Additionally, we debug crashes collected from our production environments and often write fixes to make Ruby and gems more stable. Ruby releases a patch release with backported fixes once every few months, but we would like to have these fixes applied as soon as possible.