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I use RMagick for a rails based image repository, and I have to shell out to run the RMagick code because of memory problems. When I used to keep it all in the rails process, those guys would get up to the 2-3G range over the course of a couple of days.

I'll have to check out minimagick, it might be cleaner than what I am doing now.

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Have you tried manually calling GC.start with rmagick

In this particular application, I have to inspect PDF and TIFF files that might have hundreds of pages or frames. These files can be over 100MB easily. Running those through RMagick makes the process blow up to enormous sizes. Even if the memory gets garbage collected, Solaris doesn't really release it.

Its just safer to keep it in a different process.

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