Fork to Run Heavy Jobs
Cycling long-running Ruby instances helps to deal with sudden increases in memory consumption. But often we know beforehand that the code we’re going to execute will need memory. For example, our database query returned 100,000 rows, and we need to compute complex statistics based on that data.
We can let that memory-heavy operation run and then let our infrastructure restart the Ruby process. But there’s a better solution. We can fork our process and execute the memory-heavy code in the child process. This way, only the child process will grow in memory, and when it exits, the parent process remains unaffected.
The simplest possible implementation looks like this:
| | pid = fork do |
| | heavy_function |
| | end |
| | Process::waitpid(pid) ... |
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