New Relic recently made the big move to Ruby 1.9.3 which showed meaningful improvements over 1.8, particularly in garbage collection. So this talk is taking a look at what changed in Ruby's garbage collection that caused much of the improvements. We will start with the fundamentals of garbage collection but work down to the nitty gritty C code to get to the details of what's going on, starting with rb_newobj(). You should walk away with an understanding of how garbage collection works in MRI and a nice appreciation for the overall lifecycle of Ruby objects.
Chris Kelly is a Developer and Evangelist at New Relic. He is a self-identified happiness engineer, writing code that makes someone else's day better. He's blogged, talked, or written code on everything from Ruby and Rails, to front-end best practices and DevOps. He spends a lot of time thinking about how our tools and processes effect our teams and our code, you may have seen him on a soap box recently at OSCON, QCon, or PuppetConf.
