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.
• The ability to performance tune the garbage collector.
• The MBARI patch set, for improved garbage collection efficiency.
• The zero-copy context switching patch, included as an experimental feature.
• 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 several years now and is already used by many high-profile websites and organizations, such as New York Times, Twitter, 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)

Ruby Enterprise Edition is 100% open source.

Changes

This REE release is merged with Ruby 1.8.7-p334 because of the recent security vulnerabilities. Users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible.

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.