Module: Unicorn::OobGC

Relationships & Source Files
Defined in:	lib/unicorn/oob_gc.rb

Overview

Strongly consider github.com/tmm1/gctools if using Ruby 2.1+ It is built on new APIs in Ruby 2.1, so it is more intelligent than this historical implementation.

Users on Ruby 2.0 (not 2.1+) may also want to check out lib/middleware/unicorn_oobgc.rb from the Discourse project (github.com/discourse/discourse)

The following information is only for historical versions of Ruby.

Runs GC after requests, after closing the client socket and before attempting to accept more connections.

This shouldn’t hurt overall performance as long as the server cluster is at <50% CPU capacity, and improves the performance of most memory intensive requests. This serves to improve client-visible performance (possibly at the cost of overall performance).

Increasing the number of worker_processes may be necessary to improve average client response times because some of your workers will be busy doing GC and unable to service clients. Think of using more workers with this module as a poor man’s concurrent GC.

We’ll call GC after each request is been written out to the socket, so the client never sees the extra GC hit it.

This middleware is only effective for applications that use a lot of memory, and will hurt simpler apps/endpoints that can process multiple requests before incurring GC.

This middleware is only designed to work with unicorn, as it harms performance with keepalive-enabled servers.

Example (in config.ru):

require 'unicorn/oob_gc'

# GC ever two requests that hit /expensive/foo or /more_expensive/foo
# in your app.  By default, this will GC once every 5 requests
# for all endpoints in your app
use Unicorn::OobGC, 2, %r{\A/(?:expensive/foo|more_expensive/foo)}

Feedback from users of early implementations of this module:

Class Method Summary

.new(app, interval = 5, path = %r{\A/})

this pretends to be Rack middleware because it used to be But we need to hook into unicorn internals so we need to close the socket before clearing the request env.

Instance Method Summary

#process_client(*args) Internal use only

Class Method Details

.new(app, interval = 5, path = %r{\A/})

this pretends to be Rack middleware because it used to be But we need to hook into unicorn internals so we need to close the socket before clearing the request env.

interval is the number of requests matching the path regular expression before invoking GC.

[ GitHub ]

# File 'lib/unicorn/oob_gc.rb', line 58


def self.new(app, interval = 5, path = %r{\A/})
  @@nr = interval
  self.const_set :OOBGC_PATH, path
  self.const_set :OOBGC_INTERVAL, interval
  ObjectSpace.each_object(Unicorn::HttpServer) do |s|
    s.extend(self)
  end
  app # pretend to be Rack middleware since it was in the past
end

Instance Method Details

#process_client(*args)

This method is for internal use only.

[ GitHub ]

# File 'lib/unicorn/oob_gc.rb', line 69


def process_client(*args)
  super(*args) # Unicorn::HttpServer#process_client
  env = instance_variable_get(:@request).env
  if OOBGC_PATH =~ env['PATH_INFO'] && ((@@nr -= 1) <= 0)
    @@nr = OOBGC_INTERVAL
    env.clear
    disabled = GC.enable
    GC.start
    GC.disable if disabled
  end
end