On Sat, 23 Sep 2006 ben / somethingmodern.com wrote:

> Does anyone have experience with using Ruby for analysis (*lots* of
> maths), on a machine with a ridiculous amount of RAM? For example, a
> hip 64-bit Linux kernel on a machine with 32 or 64 GB of physical RAM.

i've had issues using mmap with files larger than 32gb - i'm not sure if the
latest release has fixed this or not...  in general you can run into issues
with extenstions since ruby fixnums keep a bit to mark them as objects...

> Are there any "gotchas" I should be aware of? Would all the RAM be
> addressable by a given Ruby process? Or would I still have to be forking a
> number of processes, each allocated a bit of the address space (blech)?

assuming you have two or four cpus this might not be a bad idea - ipc is so
dang easy with ruby it's trivial to coordinate processes.  i have a slave
class i've used for this before:

http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/slave/
http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/slave/slave-0.0.1/README

regards.


-a
-- 
in order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow - and that is
likely to hurt. -- wei wu wei