How to deal with memory leaks in RMagick in Ruby?

Question

Im developing web-application with Merb and im looking for some safe and stable image processing library. I used to work with Imagick in php, then moved to ruby and start us

Answer 1

Actually, it isn't really a Ruby specific problem, other Interpreters share that as well. The concrete problem is that the GC of Ruby only sees memory that was allocated by Ruby itself, and not by external libraries (with the notable exception of the library using Rubys memory management facilities). So, a ImageMagick-Object in Ruby memory space is really small, but the image in the space managed by ImageMagick is large. So, this is not a leak per se, but it behaves like one. Rubys Garbage Collector never kicks in if your Process stays under a certain limit (8MB is standard). As ImageMagick never creates large objects in Ruby space, it probably never kicks in. So, either you use the proposed method of spawning a new process or using exec. Another rather nifty one is to have an image processing service in the backend that forks for every task. Another one would be to have some kind of monitoring in place that kickstarts the GC every once in a while.

There is another Library called MagickWand by Timothy Paul Hunter (the author of RMagick) that tries to address these issues and create a nicer API. It's in alpha and requires a rather new release of ImageMagick, though.