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Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

We did some measurements with Padrino applications in the wild and found that all of them could be improved a lot in relatively simple ways. E.g. by not loading multiple JSON parsers. Padrino being a rather slim framework on top of Sinatra, that often meant getting below 80mb memory usage (on a full stack!).

Our takeway was that the (Rails) monolith model tends to put a lot of things into one process space. Controlling library loads can be a chore.

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Exactly, Ruby app was monolith so it was consuming much more then this single feature would require. Now there is double benefit Go already uses lot less memory and its microservice. Plus with Ruby we have to run multiple processes so whatever memory single process consume * # of workers.

I could have rebuilt in Ruby and that was my first thought but deploying and maintaining Ruby apps are lot harder then you can imagine. I didn't like idea of maintaining lots of small ruby apps. Once you deploy single Go application, you might not want to deploy another Ruby app.

Not going to argue your decision, the process of splitting up is also a chance to change the platform.

We do a lot of non-Rails Ruby-work and did implement Microservice-Architectures in it and found it rather unproblematic. The trick is not to start with a full-stack and build down, but to start with a small kernel of an app, deploy it, add something, deploy it, iterate, iterate, iterate.

Plus with Ruby we have to run multiple processes so whatever memory single process consume times # of workers.

I don't use the Ruby stack, but if forking happens after loading libraries, this is not true, since most UNIXes (such as Linux) use COW memory pages when forking. So, it may appear that you use N times the memory of a single process, but most of their memory pages are shared.

See fork(2).

Yes, but garbage-collected languages with embedded markers (which Ruby used for a long time) are not at all COW-friendly (because GC runs touch the pages).

Only in recent Ruby versions is that not a problem (and was changed for exactly that reason).

But yes, your memory report might be read wrong.

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