High memory use during assets precompilation

dev
#1

During upgrades Bundler uses a lot of memory in relation to the rest of the installation during the assets precompilation. This would hint at some VM object refcount thing not releasing the touched objects (files having been read in?) and thus the GC not firing and doing its job. Most likely this is an artefact of either Bundler itself or the Rails asset pipeline.

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
3952 1000      20   0 3636888 651740  14836 R  86,8 31,8   2:23.24 bundle
3433 1000      20   0 1681992 190036   4776 S   0,0  9,3   0:05.55 ruby
3403 1000      20   0 1688156 172824   4812 S   0,0  8,4   0:05.95 ruby
3391 1000      20   0 1687128 143528   5100 S   0,0  7,0   0:05.95 ruby
3366 1000      20   0  510236 105780   4528 S   0,3  5,2   0:02.84 ruby
2920 1000      20   0  465132  92584   6804 S   0,0  4,5   0:11.59 ruby

For your consideration to maybe take a deeper look at this, as it is causing annoying shuffling for sysadmins with other processes on servers at upgrade times if the servers are provisioned for the runtime memory requirements.

6 Likes
#2

@sgrif is painfully aware of this :slight_smile:

The bad news, at the moment stuff is looking even worse if we upgrade to sprockets 4 (we are on 3)

The good news, some time this year we plan to move off sprockets altogether and make this a non-issue.

4 Likes
#3

I figured you would hit this bit of juggling on your hosted services and hoped you would have cooked up a pattern in-house.

If you have a public ticket on an open source component for that at some point, do cross post here - Iā€™m willing to help tackle this (design-side, implementation-side, just general input, metrification, testing).

Otherwise may the UNIX pipe (or Goroutine or equivalent) be with you.

#4

RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT_MAX=20971520 RUBY_GC_OLDMALLOC_LIMIT_MAX=20971520 RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_MAX_SLOTS=50000 RUBY_GC_HEAP_OLDOBJECT_LIMIT_FACTOR=0.9 bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Seems you fixed this via GC parametres at some point as of late, thank you.

5 Likes