Phusion Blog

What is Ruby Enterprise Edition?

Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) is a server-oriented distribution of the official Ruby interpreter, and includes various additional enhancements, such as:

• A “copy-on-write friendly” garbage collector, capable of reducing Ruby on Rails applications’ memory usage by 33% on average.
• The tcmalloc memory allocator, which lowers overall memory usage and boosts memory allocation speed.
• Performance enhancements for single-threaded applications (SIGVTALRM patch) and for Sparc machines (Sparc patch).
• The ability to performance tune the garbage collector.
• Various analysis and debugging features.

REE can be easily installed in parallel to your existing Ruby interpreter, allowing you switch to REE with minimal hassle or risk. REE has been out for about a year 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

“Virtual timer expired” bug fixed

It turns out that the single threading performance fix (SIGVTALRM patch) that was included in the last release had a bug which caused Ruby to crash with a “Virtual timer expired” error in some circumstances. This problem has been fixed, and our sincere apologies for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
If you were experiencing any crash problems, then please upgrade to this release.

Other changes

There are also some minor documentation and installer improvements.

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