memory-profiler

A rudimentary Ruby memory profiler that uses pure in-VM techniques to analyse the object space and attempt to determine memory usage trends.

• Takes instantaneous snapshots, and can be used to determine trends between subsequent instances.
• Can also be used to detect memory leaks (obscure object references, etc.) in particular blocks or sections of code.

Note that this uses pure Ruby code and techniques, without patches to the VM. As such it is trivial to install and use, but it doesn't have access to raw memory management/garbage collection data, so is forced to estimate, and it will affect performance noticeably.

It has been tested with the following Ruby versions (ruby -v):

• ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [i486-linux]
• ruby 1.9.1p243 (2009-07-16 revision 24175) [i486-linux]

This project was inspired by the similar Ruby memory profiler at http://code.google.com/p/ruby-memory-profiler/ , which was apparently released under a BSD (or BSD-style) license; but since no attribution details were included, I haven't copied them here anywhere.

The simplest way to use this utility is to copy the file: lib/memory-profiler.rb to your project somewhere, and include it directly.

However the correct way is to build the gem, so that you can use it in all your projects.

To build the gem:

gem build memory-profiler.gemspec gem install memory-profiler-1.0.2.gem

Then in your code:

require 'rubygems' # Ruby 1.8 only require 'memory-profiler'

Refer to RDoc documentation for more detail, but here's an example for using the utility in your Ruby program:

start the daemon, and let us know the file to which it reports

puts MemoryProfiler.start_daemon( :limit=>5, :delay=>10, :marshall_size=>true, :sort_by=>:absdelta )

5.times do blah = Hash.new([])

# compare memory space before and after executing a block of code
rpt  = MemoryProfiler.start( :limit=>10 ) do
  # some activities likely to create object references
  100.times{ blah[1] << 'aaaaa' }
  1000.times{ blah[2] << 'bbbbb' }
end

# display the report in a (slightly) readable form
puts MemoryProfiler.format(rpt)

sleep 7

end

terminate the daemon

MemoryProfiler.stop_daemon