You’ve got an app with runaway memory use, what do you do hotshot? What do you do? If you’ve exausted the usual suspects it might be time to take drastic steps. It might be time to take a production heap dump. I previously wrote about doing this on Heroku, but since then we’ve launched Heroku exec, a way to SSH into a live running Dyno to allow you to debug. Now that you can do that, you don’t need an AWS account or any fancy gems to generate a heap dump, just activate this feature and add the rbtrace gem to your app. Let’s do this to an app together.

First we need to set up the app with Heroku Exec. Check the Heroku Exec docs as these steps may change in the future. We’re going to start by installing the plugin:

$ heroku plugins:install heroku-cli-exec

Next execute:

$ heroku ps:exec Creating heroku-exec:test on issuetriage... free Adding the Heroku Exec buildpack to issuetriage Run the following commands to redeploy your app, then Heroku Exec will be ready to use: git commit -m "Heroku Exec initialization" --allow-empty git push heroku master

This will add a free addon to your app to allow you connect to your Dynos. But to be able to use it, you have to deploy. You can do this by running

$ git commit -m "Heroku Exec" --allow-empty $ git push heroku master

Once your app is done deploying you can SSH into a running Dyno by executing

$ heroku ps:exec Establishing credentials... done Connecting to web.1 on ⬢ issuetriage... ~ $

Before we can take a heap dump, we’ll need to tell your app to start tracing object allocations. Get out of your ps:exec session if you haven’t already.

Add the rbtrace gem to your Gemfile :

# Gemfile gem "rbtrace"

Then run bundle install locally. Next, you’ll want to tell your app to start tracing allocations. If you’re using a forked webserver like Unicorn or Puma, you can enable this in an on_worker_boot block or similar.

If you’re using Puma, add this code to your config/puma.rb file:

on_worker_boot do if ENV [ 'DYNO' ] == 'web.1' # Trace objects on 1 Dyno to generate heap dump in production require 'objspace' ObjectSpace . trace_object_allocations_start end end

Here we’re telling any worker processes to trace where objects were created at. This is not “free” and will cause the Dyno to run slightly slower, because of this we want to limit to running this code in just one Dyno web.1 .

You’ll want to commit this and deploy it. Once you’ve done that you can now ssh into your Dyno and generate the Heap dump.

$ heroku ps:exec Establishing credentials... done Connecting to web.1 on ⬢ issuetriage... ~ $

First we’ll need to figure out the PID of your worker processes.

~ $ ps -eo pid,comm,ppid | grep ruby 29 ruby 3 51 ruby 29

We’re looking at two Ruby processes in our Dyno. The first has a PID of 29 and a parent PID of 3. The second has a PID of 51 and a parent PID of 29. This means that 51’s parent is also a Ruby process. Puma uses a master process to hand off requests to child or “worker” processes. We want to run our heap dump against our “child process” which is 51 .

Note your PID will be different, use the same technique to determine your child Ruby processes.

We can generate the heap dump using rbtrace with this command:

$ bundle exec rbtrace -p 51 -e 'Thread.new{GC.start;require "objspace";io=File.open("/tmp/ruby-heap.dump", "w"); ObjectSpace.dump_all(output: io); io.close}'

This will generate a heap dump in the file /tmp/ruby-heap.dump .

We can now download this file to our local machines. Exit the ps:exec sessions. The file continues to live on the Dyno because the Dyno has not restarted yet. You can now run this command:

$ heroku ps:copy /tmp/ruby-heap.dump

This will download the file and put it in your local directory with the name ruby-heap.dump .

We can now use debugging tools on this dump file. Such as the heapy gem that I wrote and maintain.

$ heapy read ruby-heap.dump Analyzing Heap ============== Generation: nil object count: 302087, mem: 0.0 kb Generation: 4 object count: 171, mem: 6174.9 kb Generation: 5 object count: 4769, mem: 1614.3 kb Generation: 6 object count: 1, mem: 0.2 kb Generation: 8 object count: 199, mem: 8.6 kb Generation: 9 object count: 1, mem: 0.0 kb Generation: 12 object count: 44, mem: 198.3 kb Generation: 13 object count: 6, mem: 0.5 kb Generation: 14 object count: 645, mem: 1079.0 kb Generation: 15 object count: 74, mem: 5.1 kb Heap total ============== Generations ( active ) : 10 Count: 307997 Memory: 9080.9 kb

You can dig into a generation using

$ heapy read ruby-heap.dump 5 Analyzing Heap ( Generation: 5 ) ------------------------------- allocated by memory ( 1653008 ) ( in bytes ) ============================== 1049992 /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.4.0/gems/rack-timeout-0.4.2/lib/rack/timeout/support/scheduler.rb:67 170671 /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.4.0/gems/json-2.0.3/lib/json/common.rb:224 88623 /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.4.0/gems/multi_json-1.12.1/lib/multi_json/adapters/oj.rb:15 # ...

Here we can see the three locations that allocated the most memory.

I’ll admit that I’ve never successfully found an application level memory problem from a heap dump, but I know some have. If you’re out of other options, it’s another thing you can try. The exciting thing about ps:exec is that you’re not limited to heap dumps, you now have access to all system level debugging tools for live running processes. For instance you could install lsof via the Heroku APT buildpack to debug in a way you never could before. Keep in mind that if you’re running on a regular Dyno it’s in a container and on a shared system with other applications so thing like ps to get memory use won’t be entirely accurate. If you need more accuracy from system level commands, consider our performance-m and performance-l Dynos which take up an entire VPS.

Also some tools like gdb cannot be used do to security restrictions. You might get an error like Permission denied. .