How Phusion Built A More Efficient Ruby 1.8 Interpreter

By Peter Cooper

Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition developers Ninh "Hernandez" Bui and Hongli Lai travelled to San Francisco last week and gave a 35 minute Google Tech Talk called Building A More Efficient Ruby Interpreter.

The talk focused on how the guys (with some help from other sources, including Joe Damato and Aman Gupta) have dug into MRI Ruby 1.8's internals to get some significant memory usage and thread performance improvements for their Ruby Enterprise Edition branch (they're not calling it a fork) of Ruby 1.8.

The video is presented in HD so the slides are easy to see and the audio is solid. If taking a small trip through Ruby's garbage collection, memory allocation, and threading system sounds good to you (or you just want to know what Ruby Enterprise Edition is all about), it's a must watch. If you want some practical Ruby stuff and don't care about what the interpreter's doing, give it a miss.

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