Reporter: writetodan[at]yahoo.com
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 10.34am, Wednesday, 23rd May 2007]

server rails processes (lighttpd / fastcgi) are leaking memory at approx 10MB per minute on www.

simple tests on dev.openstreetmap.org show similar memory leaks with simple loops doing XML output via REXML or ruby-libxml.

ruby-libxml has known memory leaks: http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=7945&group_id=494&atid=1971

it also appears that certain versions of ruby, or perhaps ruby compiled with certain gcc versions, has leaks:

http://fredbrunel.com/journal/2006/12/trouble-with-rails-and-ruby-185/

the post indicates that building ruby with gcc4 is problematic - rolling back to gcc3.3 and re-installing might help.

replies to that post also indicate that installing fastthread via gem might help:

http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/programming/fastthread.html

sudo gem install fastthread

this problem has knock-on effects in that periodic restarting of server processes might be contributing to 500 errors seen using server.