# RMagick 2.10.0 released with support for Ruby-managed memory

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rmagick-2-10-0-released-with-support-for-ruby-managed-memory/170660>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [June 20, 2009, 1:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rmagick-2-10-0-released-with-support-for-ruby-managed-memory/170660 "2009-06-20T13:00:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\
**Post date:** [June 20, 2009, 1:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rmagick-2-10-0-released-with-support-for-ruby-managed-memory/170660/1 "2009-06-20T13:00:22Z")

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I’ve just uploaded RMagick 2.10.0 to RubyForge. This release includes  
experimental support for using Ruby-managed memory for all RMagick  
allocations. This means that Image objects (and all other RMagick  
objects) are managed by Ruby and will be automatically garbage  
collected. You do not have to manually invoke GC.start or call the  
Image#destroy! method.

This support is very raw, very experimental, and disabled by default. To  
enable it, set

RMAGICK\_ENABLE\_MANAGED\_MEMORY = true

_before_ requiring RMagick. When RMagick is using Ruby-managed memory it  
sets Magick::MANAGED\_MEMORY = true.

The ImageMagick team has very kindly helped resolve the last known issue  
with this new functionality. You must be running the absolute latest  
version of ImageMagick, 6.5.3-10. This version just became available  
yesterday.

I haven’t had much time to evaluate the new support. My initial  
impression is that my tests run slower when Ruby is managing all the  
memory, and in 1.8.x (as I would expect) Ruby’s memory footprint is  
larger. The memory footprint in 1.9.1 is relatively smaller. If you  
decide to try this I’d appreciate it if you’d share your experiences.

The RMagick prerequisites have changed since the last release. This  
release of RMagick requires Ruby 1.8.5 or later and ImageMagick 6.3.5-10  
or later.

RMagick 2.10.0 is available as always at RubyForge:  
[http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/). Please wait a few hours for the  
mirrors to be updated.

RMagick is an interface to the ImageMagick ([www.imagemagick.org](http://www.imagemagick.org)) and  
image processing library. RMagick supports more than 100 image formats,  
including GIF, JPEG, PNG. RMagick comes with comprehensive HTML  
documentation, including 185 complete examples.

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**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\
**Post date:** [June 27, 2009, 9:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rmagick-2-10-0-released-with-support-for-ruby-managed-memory/170660/2 "2009-06-27T21:07:58Z")

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Tim H. wrote:

> RMAGICK\_ENABLE\_MANAGED\_MEMORY = true  
> impression is that my tests run slower when Ruby is managing all the  
> memory, and in 1.8.x (as I would expect) Ruby’s memory footprint is  
> larger. The memory footprint in 1.9.1 is relatively smaller. If you  
> decide to try this I’d appreciate it if you’d share your experiences.

Quick follow-up: I took a harder look and determined that my tests run  
in almost exactly the same time when Ruby is managing all the memory.  
There is no slowdown. Ruby’s resident memory size (as shown by top(1))  
is larger, but I would expect that.