I'm looking for tips on how to stomp memory leaks, as I haven't a clue how to do it properly. I have a very young Rails 2.0.2 application that jumps from 180mb total usage to 510mb total usage in about 60-90mins. I tried using Dike and could not make heads or tails of the data. All I know is that the heaviest page on my site, dashboard#index, was producing 700,000+ String objects according to Dike, but I have no idea how to reduce that number, or where to even start looking. (As a primitive experiment, I commented out all the db queries in dashboard_controller and only reduced the number of string objects by about 30,000.)
Some other info about my app: we use Rmagick fairly extensively, but there's almost no traffic on the site right now as we still in a closed alpha testing stage. There are also fairly db-intensive routines in dashboard which compiles user and friend activities over the past couple of days. I haven't introduced any form of caching yet, although I'm looking at Interlock/memcached.
Any tips or links to good tutorials would be really helpful. I've seen all of the various solutions for finding leaks (Bleakhouse, MemoryProfiler, the aforementioned Dike), but unfortunately, I don't know what to do after I've established that there is in fact a leak.
Thanks
:luis