Controllers don't seemed to be released at the end of a request

rubyonrails-talk
1

Controllers seem to be leaked in 1.2.6 but not in 2.0.2. I created an empty rails app with nothing but the following controller:

class HomeController < ApplicationController   def index     @contents =     1.upto(2000) {       @contents << "big long string."     }   end end

where "big long string is about 1K long. This creates a controller with a member variable with a good 2 megs worth of stuff hanging off it. (@contents) If I run this controller in 1.2.6, and then exercise the app, it leaks like a sieve, but in 2.0.2 it doesn't. I was wondering what is hanging onto controllers at the end of a request? I can work around the issue by setting @contents to nil or an empty array at the end of the template but that seems like a hack and the app is still leaking controllers.

Does anyone know what changed in 2.0.2 so that controllers can be collected?

2

Sigh. I think Im wrong about this. I added a finalizer using ObjectSpace.define_finalizer to the controller where it is created in base.rb. The act of defining the finalizer seems to keep the item from being collected. Sigh. Taking out the define_finalizer seems to fix the issue.

On the other hand something still holding onto my controllers in my full app.

3

We were investigating something similar recently at the day job, and tracked things back to routing. I'll try and dig up our findings.

~ j.

4

That would be great. I'll also start looking into routing myself. Thanks for the pointer.