Tweaking Rails to Reduce RAM Usage

Rails
1

Is there a way to tweak rails 1.0 or 1.1-rc1 to use less RAM?

I’m using a VPS (Linux UML) with < 160 MB RAM and would like to explore
ways to make rails run more efficiently under such constraints.

Are there articles/tips about this or do I need to look into this from
scratch?

2

Rails wrote:

Is there a way to tweak rails 1.0 or 1.1-rc1 to use less RAM?

I’m using a VPS (Linux UML) with < 160 MB RAM and would like to explore
ways to make rails run more efficiently under such constraints.

Are there articles/tips about this or do I need to look into this from
scratch?

Two things I’m aware of:

  1. don’t use more FCGI processes than you need - one or two should be
    fine unless you have many users

  2. don’t load Rails frameworks that you aren’t using: see
    config/environment.rb around line 15:

    Skip frameworks you’re not going to use

    config.frameworks -= [ :action_web_service, :action_mailer ]

Uncomment the second line shown if you are not using ActionWebService or
ActionMailer.

HTH

Justin

3

Another option is to recompile your binaries with -Os if your compiler
supports the flag (only very old versions of gcc don’t use this flag
properly). This does provide a sizable decrease in binary size and thus
the
code size in memory.

4

As well as the memory Rails uses, you should look at the memory it’s
supporting processes such as the spawner / reaper are using. I have a
128Mb Xen based VPS and switched to using runit for process
supervision with the help of the capistrano-runit-tasks library I wrote.

I’ve just replied to Roberto S. in the ANN: capistrano-runit-
tasks 0.2.0 thread with more details so have a look at that.

Cheers,

Chris