Phusion Blog

Update: Ruby Enterprise Edition has officially reached End-of-Life in 2012.

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.
• 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.

Ruby Enterprise Edition is 100% open source.

Changes

Ruby Enterprise Edition 2011.12 and 2012.01 have actually also been quietly released, but they didn’t have proper announcements on our blog. Here’s a cumulative summary:

Upgraded to Ruby 1.8.7-p358

REE 2011.01 was based on 1.8.7-p330. This latest version includes not only bug fixes but also various security fixes.

Upgraded to RubyGems 1.8.15

The previous REE release included RubyGems 1.5.2.

For a long time we’ve been reluctant to upgrade RubyGems past 1.5 because many libraries were incompatible with RubyGems > 1.5. But today, the situation has been reversed: many gemspecs in the RubyGems.org repository are incompatible with RubyGems < 1.8. As such, we’ve upgraded RubyGems to the latest version.

Upgraded to the MBARI 8 patch set

Brent Roman has released a new version of his MBARI patch set, which solves many mysterious stability problems that plagued previous versions. This REE release should be significantly more stable.

Compatible with Xcode >= 4 and OS X Lion

The REE installer now properly advises Xcode >= 4 users and OS X Lion users on how to install the proper compiler that’s necessary for installing REE.

Experimental zero-copy context switch patch removed

This experimental patch set was never production-ready, so as of this release it has been removed.

End of Life

Support for Ruby 1.8.x is slowly being dropped by the upstream Ruby core developers in favor of Ruby 1.9 and beyond. The Rails team has recently announced that they will be dropping Ruby 1.8 support in Rails 4. As such, we are also slowly End-of-Life’ing Ruby Enterprise Edition.

We have no plans to create a Ruby 1.9-based version of Ruby Enterprise Edition for the following reasons:

• A copy-on-write patch has recently been checked into Ruby 2.0.
• Many of the patches in Ruby Enterprise Edition are simply not necessary in 1.9.
• We wish to focus our efforts on Phusion Passenger and other products. Instead of doing many things poorly, we want to do a few things, but do them very very well.

We plan on providing minor fixes and updates for the time being, but users are recommended to slowly migrate to Ruby 1.9. Phusion Passenger <= 3.1 users can use reverse proxy setups to run multiple Ruby versions on the same server. Starting from Phusion Passenger 3.2 it will support multiple Ruby versions natively without the need for reverse proxy setups.

Looking for new maintainers

We believe that Ruby Enterprise Edition has served its purpose. That said, we understand that many people still rely on Ruby 1.8 for the time being because of compatibility issues. Therefore we would like to ask for volunteers who want to take over maintenance of Ruby Enterprise Edition. Please contact us if you are interested!

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.