ALERT - Ruby fcgi 0.8.5 memory leak

Robby Russell — Thu, 12 May 2005 16:18:12 -0500

Just a FYI. If you have installed fcgi from RubyGems, the version that is currently available as a gem (0.8.5) has a known memory leak... which has crippled one of our servers a few times this past week as it slowly sucks the life out of the machine.

I hope that we can get the fix in 0.8.6 which you can download here available as a gem in the near future. I think that a lot of people will unknowingly use the one in RubyGems and not be aware of this major problem (as I was until this morning when I finally tracked the root of the problem).

Thanks to the Typo people for alerting me of this issue… especially when I saw that this blog alone was using more than 100 MB of Ram after 2 hours of being up. I almost began to think that Java might be more efficient. ;-)

If you are not sure what version you are running, you can find out by doing this on a UNIX machine:

# gem list|grep cgi
fcgi (0.8.5)

Download and install fcgi 0.8.6, uninstall 0.8.5 from rubygems if necessary (I did just to be sure that apache/fcgi was using the new version) and restart your web server(s).

Robby on Rails: ALERT - Ruby fcgi 0.8.5 memory leak

ALERT - Ruby fcgi 0.8.5 memory leak