bloat_check

BloatCheck is yet another tool for debugging bloat and memory leaks in ruby projects. This one has the feature that you can wrap any bit of code with a “BloatCheck” and it will log elapsed time, and memory & object growth.

Plus you can include it in any rails controller to log that same info per request.

Installation

Gemfile:

gem 'bloat_check'

Usage: Ruby Code

Put this line anywhere:

BloatCheck.log("some label")

and it will write to the log the current time, process memory size, and 5 ruby objects classes with most instances, prefixed with “BLOAT” and your label.

Wrap it around any existing code, such as

BloatCheck.log("here's looking at you") do
    some_suspec_computation()
    and_more()
end

And it will write to the log the deltas: elapsed time, change in memory size, and 5 ruby object classes that had the largest increase in number of instances.

Usage: Rails Controllers

In a rails controller, you can do

class MyController < ApplicationController
    include BloatCheck::WrapRequests

    # etc.
end

and every request will log the deltas incurred during that request.

Disabling (e.g., when running tests)

BloatCheck is slow (calls system ‘ps’, and runs through ObjectSpace#each_object), so you might want to disable it in your unit tests or integration tests. Do that via:

BloatCheck.disable = true

Put this, e.g. in your spec/spec_helper.rb file

Choosing the logger

By default, BloatCheck logs to the Rails logger if Rails is defined, or to STDOUT otherwise. But you can specify your own logger using

BloatCheck.logger = Logger.new(...)

Versions

Has been tested on MRI 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2

History

Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.