This content has been automatically translated from Ukrainian.
Garbage Collector in Ruby β, it is an automated memory management mechanism that is responsible for monitoring and releasing memory that is no longer used by the program. The GS makes it so that the memory that was allocated for objects that are no longer needed by the program can be reused, thereby optimizing the system's resources.
Just imagine that there are objects in memory that are unnecessary. Their number is constantly growing. Memory leak occurs. The server may stop responding, and in the case of scaling, your accounts will only increase. So GC is needed to use RAM efficiently.
Garbage Collector at Ruby works on the principle of "mark-and-sweep". The garbage collector passes through all objects that can be reached from root objects (for example, local variables and global variables) and labels (mark) them as "available". After the marking process is completed, the collector moves to the cleaning phase (sweep /sweeping), where it frees memory from all objects that were not marked. These objects are considered "unattainable" and their memory (the memory they previously occupied) can be reused.
Ruby also uses the concept of generations (Generational Garbage Collection or GGC), which includes dividing objects into generations according to their frequency of use, allowing more efficient memory management, focusing the garbage collector's efforts on younger, more dynamic objects that change more often.
GC is usually talked about when Memory Leak appears on the server. Of course, restarting the server will help for a while (RAM will clear and start filling up again), but it will still have to be dealt with.
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