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by cheald 4829 days ago
Please make sure you're setting higher GC limits for the Ruby tests. Ruby's defaults are awful for a framework, and result in a LOT of GC thrash. It's not uncommon to see an order of magnitude improvement in performance when they're tuned properly. (edit: I'll just send a pull request, I found the setup file!)

Something else you might consider is the OJ gem rather than just the stock Ruby json gem. The latter is notoriously slow and memory-hungry (which will compound the GC issues!)
1 comments
somlor 4829 days ago
> make sure you're setting higher GC limits for the Ruby tests

Could you elaborate on this, or point me in the right direction? I'm learning Rails and curious.

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somlor 4828 days ago
For anyone still lurking, this user replied to me via email:

Ruby allocates heaps for its objects, and sets GC thresholds based on those heap sizes. Ruby allows you to change those settings via environment variables, which means that you can end up doing fewer allocations and less aggressive GC, which makes sense when using a full framework like Rails, which is going to allocate a lot of objects.

There's a more complete answer here to get you started: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13387664/ruby-gc-executio...

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