[sanderjd]

In practice, modules and classes are not defined that way - likely not in your own application, and certainly not in all the gems you depend on, or in the Rails framework itself. That entire set of transitive dependencies can take up a lot of memory.

[tychver]

The class definitions will be a tiny fraction of memory usage. A template Rails app memory usage only has about 20% managed by Ruby. The rest is the VM, C libraries, maybe long strings etc. Definitely not class definitions pulled in from gems.