How to deal with memory leak in Ruby/Rails

Question

I'm developping a Rails application that deals with huge amounts of data and it halts since it uses all memory of my computer due to memory leak (allocated objects that are not released).

In my application, data is organized in a hierarchical way, as a tree, where each node of level "X" contains the sum of data of level "X+1". For example if the data of level "X+1" contains the amount of people in cities, level "X" contains the amount of people in states. In this way, level "X"'s data is obtained by summing up the amount of data in level "X+1" (in this case, people).

For the sake of this question, consider a tree with four levels: country, State, City and Neighbourhoods and that each level is mapped into Activerecords tables (countries, states, cities, neighbourhoods).

Data is read from a csv file that fills the leaves of the tree, that is, the neighbourhoods table.

Afetr that, data flows from bottom (neighbourhoods) to top (countries) in the following sequence:

1) Neighbourhoods data is summed to Cities;
2) after step 1 is completed, Cities  data is summed to States;
3) after step 2 is completed, States  data is summed to Country;

The schematic code I'm using is as follows:

1 cities = City.all
2 cities.each do |city|
3   city.data = 0
4   city.neighbourhoods.each do |neighbourhood|
5       city.data = city.data + neighbourhood.data
6   end
7   city.save
8 end

The lowest level of the tree contains 3.8M of records. Each time lines 2-8 are executed, a city is summed up and after line 8 is executed, that subtree is no longer needed, but it is never released (memory leak). After summing 50% of the cities, all my 8Gbytes of RAM vanishes.

My question is what can I do. Buy better hardware will not do since I'm working with a "small" prototype.

I know a way to make it work: restart the application for each City, but I hope someone has a better idea. The "simplest" would be to force the garbage collector to free specific objects, but seems is not a way to do it (https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-i-force-ruby-to-release-memory/195515).

From the following articles I understood that the developer should organize the data in a way to "suggest" the garbage collector what should be freed. Maybe another approach will do the trick, but the only alternative I see is Depth-first search approach instead of the reversed Breadth-first search I'm using, but I don't see why it should work.

What I read so far:

https://stackify.com/how-does-ruby-garbage-collection-work-a-simple-tutorial/

https://www.toptal.com/ruby/hunting-ruby-memory-issues

https://scoutapm.com/blog/ruby-garbage-collection

https://scoutapm.com/blog/manage-ruby-memory-usage

Thanks

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65836011/how-to-deal-with-memory-leak-in-ruby-rails

Answer 1

This isn't really a case of a memory leak. You're just indescrimely loading data off the table which will exhaust the available memory.

The solution is to load the data off the database in batches:

City.find_each do |city|
  city.update(data: city.neighbourhoods.sum(&:data))
end

If neighbourhoods.data is a simple integer you don't need to fetch the records in the first place:

City.update_all(
  'data = (SELECT SUM(neighbourhoods.data) FROM neighbourhoods WHERE neighbourhoods.city_id = cities.id)'
)

This will be an order of magnitude faster and have a trivial memory consumption as all the work is done in the database.

If you REALLY want to load a bunch of records into rails then make sure to select aggregates instead of instantiating all those nested records:

City.left_joins(:neighbourhoods)
    .group(:id)
    .select(:id, 'SUM(neighbourhoods.data) AS n_data')
    .find_each { |c| city.update(data: n_data) }