Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20090201 released

By Hongli Lai February 1st, 2009

What is Ruby Enterprise Edition?

Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) is a server-oriented distribution of the official Ruby interpreter, and includes various additional enhancements. REE’s main benefits are the ability to reduce Ruby on Rails applications’ memory usage by 33% on average, the ability to increase applications’ performance and the inclusion of various analysis and debugging features. The lower memory usage and increased performance are possible because REE includes – among other enhancements – a copy-on-write friendly garbage collector, as well as an improved memory allocator. REE has been out for several months now and is already used by many high-profile websites and organizations, such as New York Times, Shopify and 37signals.

“We switched to enterprise ruby to get the full benefit of the [copy-on-write] memory characteristics and we can absolutely confirm the memory savings of 30% some others have reported. This is many thousand dollars of savings even at today’s hardware prices.”
– Tobias Lütke (Shopify)

And just like Phusion Passenger, Ruby Enterprise Edition is 100% open source.

Changes

Version 1.8.6-20090201 is a minor bugfix release. The changes are as follows:

  • Fixed a memory corruption bug in the readline library. If you were having problems with readline or irb, try this release.
  • Preserve file attributes when installing tcmalloc. Symlinks are now properly copied as symlinks.
  • For those who do not want to or can’t use the REE installer, there are now manual installation instructions available.

Download & upgrade

To install Ruby Enterprise Edition, please visit the download page. To upgrade from a previous version, simply install into the same prefix that you installed to last time. Please also refer to the documentation for upgrade instructions.

Hongli Lai Ninh Bui

Ruby Enterprise Edition

Comments

  1. Andrei Erdoss says:
    February 2, 2009 at 11:04 am

    After installing this release on Ubuntu from the source, I can get irb to pickup the gems. If I do:

    /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/irb
    irb(main):001:0> require ‘rake’
    LoadError: no such file to load — rake
    from (irb):1:in `require’
    from (irb):1

    If I require ‘rubygems’ first, it works!

    irb(main):001:0> require ‘rake’
    LoadError: no such file to load — rake
    from (irb):1:in `require’
    from (irb):1

    What is the best fix for this?

  2. Andrei Erdoss says:
    February 2, 2009 at 11:06 am

    I totally messed that message up. :)

    If I require ‘rubygems’, then I get:

    irb(main):002:0> require ‘rubygems’
    => true
    irb(main):003:0> require ‘rake’
    => true

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