Two Garbage Collection Improvements Made Our Storefronts 8percent Faster | Rails at Scale

At Shopify, we are constantly working on improving the performance of Ruby for everyone. From YJIT, to Variable Width Allocation, to Object Shapes, we are making improvements to Ruby in many areas. One of our goals for the year is to analyze, tune and improve Ruby’s garbage collector for our largest and highest traffic apps. One of these apps is Storefront Renderer, which serves the storefronts of Shopify stores and is one of the highest traffic apps in the world. From analysis and experimentation on this app, we found two improvements in Ruby’s garbage collector that improved the average garbage collector performance by.