Reworking Memory Management in CRuby: A Practitioner Report

Ruby is a dynamic programming language that was first released in 1995 and remains heavily used today. Ruby underpins Ruby on Rails, one of the most widely deployed web application frameworks. The scale at which Rails is deployed has placed increasing pressure on the underlying CRuby implementation, and in particular its approach to memory management. CRuby implements a mark-sweep garbage collector which until recently was non-moving and only allocated fixed-size 40-byte objects, falling back to malloc to manage all larger objects. .