Question

For instance, rmagick, we use it just for making thumbnails which, say we only make use of 2% of that gem/lib.

Will it make sense not to use rmagick just for the purpose of making thumbnails and call image-magic apis from sh script, and hence not to have too many gems specified in Gemfile, less dependency etc?

Want to know experts opinions.

Answer 1

The main disadvantage is more memory use (especially in this case because rmagick has a reputation for memory leaking). I suggest the mini_magick gem as a smaller replacement.

There’s also the possibility that a badly written gem might break something else in your app.