Ruby Performance Optimization

Detect Excessive Memory Usage

But before we get to that, let’s talk about how to determine that memory usage is in fact a problem in your application. For that you’ll need two kinds of tools: one for monitoring and one for profiling.

No matter where you deploy, on servers or on customers’ workstations, you’ll need a monitoring tool to show your application’s memory usage. In the Ruby on Rails world the go-to monitoring tool is New Relic.^[13] Some deployment platforms, such as Heroku, have their own monitoring. If you prefer to set up your own solution, tools are available for that too. Good examples are Nagios^[14] and Munin.^[15]

So what can a monitoring tool show you? Something like this:

That’s the Heroku memory metric chart. You can ...