About i18n performance

rubyonrails-core
1

Hey guys,

I know that probably this issue is not about Rails Core and it's about implementation, but i discuss it with Sven on IRC and he told me to drop a line here since more people is in position to judge this that in other mailing lists.

I ask him about if whether is recommended to use Symbols or Strings when translating an application using Rails i18n translate method. Sven recommended me to use symbols but then i told him about the thing that symbols are never garbage collected, in a large application with lots of translations this would mean having all those symbols in memory.

But then i though that this translations are probably going to be used very frequently and it's not that bad to have them in memory.

So the question is, do you think string or symbols should be used? is this a performance vs memory problem?

2

Translations are loaded entirely per language, so you'll have it in memory anyway. Also, the memory overhead of having around 20,000 translation keys is probably going to be 1 megabyte at most. I wouldn't worry about it.

Manfred