Engineering Blog

Wait, What’s Compaction Again?

You may recall that Ruby divides memory allocation into tiny, small and large objects - each object is one of those.

How Does It Run?

If all goes well, the next part is underwhelming. Now we actually run it. I’m assuming you’ve done all the prior setup - you have an instance running with Rubies installed, you have a runner script and so on.First off, you can just run the runner from the command line, something like “./runner.rb”.

But What’s the Answer?

I said I didn’t know the answer when I started writing this post - and I didn’t. But I also implied that I’d find it out, and I’ve clearly run 600,000 HTTP requests’ worth of data gathering.

So… What’s This Change, Then?

You likely know that in Ruby, when you call .to_s on an object, it’s supposed to return itself “translated” to a string. For instance if you call it on the number 7 it will return the string “7”. Or if you call it on a symbol like :bob it will return the string “bob”.

Why Didn’t Ruby Get JIT Sooner?

A Ruby core developer tests a JIT implementation for stability JIT’s two big disadvantages (memory usage, startup/warmup time) are both huge CRuby advantages. That made JIT a tough sell.Ruby’s current JIT, called MJIT for “Method JIT,” was far from the first attempt. Evan Phoenix built an LLVM Ruby JIT long ago that wound up becoming Rubinius.