Ever wish that you could determine what garbage collection settings your current running version of Ruby was using? Me too, but Google was not much help for it. There are two techniques for getting the current GC settings.
Technique 1: Use sh
In Rails console (or debugger), you can run shell commands by surrounding your command in the “ characters. So you can do:
`echo $RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS`
`echo $RUBY_HEAP_FREE_MIN`
`echo $RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT`
The pros of this approach is that it maps directly to the way that most people configure their GC settings: by setting environment variables. This is a means to be certain that the files you think are getting sourced when you start Ruby are being loaded correctly.
Technique 2: Use GC.stat
As of Ruby 1.9, running “GC.stat” can tell you all sorts of information about your current GC stats. The drawback of this approach is that there isn’t clear mapping between the environment variables you set and the data that GC.stat returns. Anecdotally, it appears that GC.stats[:heap_free_num] corresponds to RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS. I’m not sure yet how the other variables get reflected, but feel free to chime in with a comment if you know how the standard Ruby GC settings map to the hash keys returned by GC.stat