One way to reduce the footprint of your application might be to take a look at Phusion’s new Ruby Enterprise Edition. They claim it uses 33% less memory (on average) than vanilla Ruby when used with their recently released mod_rails / Phusion Passenger Apache module.

I hadn’t looked at it yet since the inclusion of “Enterprise” in the name made me assume that this was a (costly) commercial offering – not that working for commercial gain is a bad thing !

However, it turns out the name is misleading since it is, in fact, an open source implementation of the Ruby language with an enhanced garbage collector and improved memory allocator (amongst other features).

Oh, and it can run alongside your existing copy of Ruby if you want to give it a whirl…

They are now planning more regular – monthly – releases of the Ruby.NET compiler and have started work on getting Ruby on Rails working. Additionally, they hope to move to a more open source, collaborative development model in the second half of this year.

I am looking forward to the next release of this compiler since their plan is that that version will support two-way interoperability between .NET languages and Ruby !