What is Fullstaq Ruby?
Fullstaq Ruby is a custom build of standard MRI Ruby interpreter with memory allocator replaced, security patches applied, and more goodies on the way.
If some old-timers are here, they can remember REE—Ruby Enterprise Edition—from ancient times of Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby on Rails 2.2 (almost ten years ago!) Ah, good ol’ times! You could install it via RVM or Rbenv, and some legacy applications are still running on it or have been just recently migrated. REE has a dozen of different patches on top of Ruby 1.8.7 to improve performance, reduce memory consumption, adjust obsolete security settings, and so on.
In MRI 1.9.x, most of these problems were solved, and, as it gained adoption, REE became obsolete. But even modern “vanilla” MRI still has quirks that can be fixed relatively easy. The most annoying of them is memory bloat due to memory fragmentation.
So it is not at all surprising that Hongli Lai, the creator of REE, have released Fullstaq Ruby.
REE is dead, long live Fullstaq Ruby!
Why do we need it?
At one of our projects at Evil Martians, we were experiencing severe memory bloat. Our application does a lot of IO, and we have a lot of Sidekiq processes with high concurrency setting (20 threads per process). This setting is optimal from the performance point of view because workers are mostly making requests to different remote APIs, our own database, and caches. But such a high level of concurrency also leads to high memory fragmentation. Our Sidekiq processes eat several gigabytes of RAM each.
Read more about choosing Sidekiq concurrency setting in the Sidekiq in Practice part 1 by Nate Berkopec.
We have decided to replace our MRI 2.6.3 to Fullstaq Ruby 2.6.3 with jemalloc to see how it will perform.
