Memory leaks do not come by often in modern Rails applications. But when they do, the road to a fix can be tortuous: it often requires extensive knowledge of memory management in Ruby, experience on profiling tools as well as properly setup application monitoring.

As a developer working on Product, one does not always have the bandwidth to learn about the subject, and setup custom tools: project deadlines could be nearing, or your expertise needed on a shiny new project that just came in. 

In this talk, I’ll walk you through a real memory leak issue we encountered on one of our background worker, and how we fixed it with no custom tooling using simple technics.