Question

I’m working on a Rails application at the moment which seems to kill
the memory on my iMac until I eventually have to restart.
I have a 2.66 GHZ processor with 4GB Ram on OSX 10.6.

When I boot the rails app, the memory consumption shows the following
(ps aux | grep rails):

Gavin      726   0.0  3.8  2590812 158860 s000  S+    9:27am 0:09.90  /Users/Gavin/.rvm/rubies/ree-1.8.7-2011.01/bin/ruby script/rails s 

The RSS is at a cool 158,860 kb
After a few requests to localhost, this number jumps up to:

Gavin      726   0.0 14.1  3031792 592888 s000  S+    9:27am 0:27.00  /Users/Gavin/.rvm/rubies/ree-1.8.7-2011.01/bin/ruby script/rails s 

592,888 kb!!

and with general development use, it goes up again and again and
again:

Gavin      726   1.5 25.0  3487516 1050180 s000  S+    9:27am 0:59.29 /Users/Gavin/.rvm/rubies/ree-1.8.7-2011.01/bin/ruby script/rails s 

I’m running REE using RVM
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) [i686-darwin10.6.0], MBARI
0x6770, Ruby Enterprise Edition 2011.01

The app is using Rails 3.0.6

The application is not particularly SQL intensive and there are almost
no associations included when records are loaded (not required in the
architecture).

Am I right in saying this is a memory leak or is there something else
I should be looking at?

Can anybody offer some advice on how I can solve this?

Thanks!

Here’s a full list of the gems used just incase there are any known
suspects in there:

source 'http://rubygems.org' 
gem "omniauth", "0.2.0" 
gem "fb_graph" 
gem 'rails', '>=3.0.6' 
gem 'mysql2' 
gem "delayed_job" 
gem "rvm" 
gem "whenever" 
gem "less" 
gem "bcrypt-ruby", :require => "bcrypt" 
gem "twitter" 
gem "paperclip" 
gem "aws-s3" 
gem "RedCloth" 
gem "decent_exposure", :git => "git://github.com/voxdolo/decent_exposure.git" 
# Application monitoring services 
gem 'hoptoad_notifier', ">=2.4.5" 
gem "newrelic_rpm", ">=2.13.4" 
gem "yahoo-weather", "1.2.0", :require => false 
gem "json", "~>1.4.6" 
gem 'will_paginate', :git => "git://github.com/mislav/will_paginate.git", :branch => "rails3" 
gem 'acts-as-taggable-on' 
gem "aasm", ">=2.2.0", :require => "aasm" 
gem 'thinking-sphinx', '2.0.2', :require => 'thinking_sphinx' 
# These gems are not required on the Staging/Production server 
group :development, :test do 
  gem 'capistrano' 
  gem "capistrano-ext" 
  gem "nifty-generators" 
  gem 'factory_girl_rails', :git => "http://github.com/CodeMonkeySteve/factory_girl_rails.git" 
  # Keep on top of the latest RSpec Gems 
  gem "rspec-rails",        :git => "git://github.com/rspec/rspec-rails.git" 
  gem "rspec",              :git => "git://github.com/rspec/rspec.git" 
  gem "rspec-core",         :git => "git://github.com/rspec/rspec-core.git" 
  gem "rspec-expectations", :git => "git://github.com/rspec/rspec-expectations.git" 
  gem "rspec-mocks",        :git => "git://github.com/rspec/rspec-mocks.git" 
  gem 'shoulda' 
  gem "mocha" 
  # gives us the mock_model method for mocha 
  gem 'rspec-rails-mocha', '~> 0.3.0' 
  gem "faker" 
  gem "autotest", ">=4.4.6" 
  gem "autotest-growl" 
  gem "autotest-rails" 
  gem "database_cleaner" 
  gem "redgreen" 
  gem "launchy" 
  gem "faker" 
  gem 'ruby-debug' 
  gem "rcov" 
  gem "rdoc" 
  gem "ruby-prof" 
end

Answer 1

aasm leaks memory very quickly when cache_classes = false (which is the default in development mode). You do use a lot of gems, but I am willing to bet aasm is behind this.

as others have said, it is best to use a memory profiler.