How do I track down a memory leak in my Ruby code?

Question

Question

I\'m debugging a memory leak in a rake task. I want to see a call stack of:

• Living objects
• What object or line originally allocated

Answer 1

There is a ruby-mass gem, which provides a nice api over ObjectSpace.

One of the ways to approach the problem is to check references after you've done with your object.

object = ...
# more logic
puts Mass.references(object)

If there is at least one reference, the object is not garbage collected and you need to figure out how to drop that reference. For example:

object.instance_variable_set("@example", nil)

# or

ObjectSpace.each_object(Your::Object::Class::Name).each do |obj|
  obj.instance_variable_set("@example", nil)
end