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Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

Ruby’s garbage collector is designed to be adaptable, scaling from short Ruby scripts to running apps that serve millions of requests per second. While it’s designed to be adaptable, it may not work optimally for every use case. For this reason, Ruby’s garbage collector supports many parameters that can be used to tune it. However, the use of these parameters requires knowledge into how the garbage collector works on the inside. Learn how the Autotuner gem can analyze your app’s traffic and provide suggestions for tuning the garbage collector.

In this article, we’ll delve into the motivations behind creating this gem, its workings, and our experimentation process with garbage collector tuning at Shopify. The next time you upgrade to a new major release of Ruby, which might be less than a year later, you will need to understand what has changed in the garbage collector and might have to retune it to regain optimal performance. The Autotuner gem is designed to assist you in finding ways to enhance the garbage collector performance of your Rails apps.

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