---
title: "A production-optimized alternative distribution of MRI"
publication: "Ruby Weekly"
issue: 455
published_at: "2019-06-20"
canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/455"
---

This week's Ruby news.       

#455 — June 20, 2019 

[Read on the Web](https://rubyweekly.com/issues/455)   

Ruby Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/ihjsg5isae38bagjp6jh.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8iWLoarTZc)   

▶[Progress on Compacting GC in Ruby 2.7](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8iWLoarTZc) — No, this is _not_ a short talk (indeed, it’s an hour long, but the actual technical part starts [at 15 minutes in](https://youtu.be/H8iWLoarTZc?t=937)) but Aaron, both a member of the Ruby and Rails core teams, explains what work is taking place to improve Ruby’s garbage collector by essentially ‘defragging’ (or ‘compacting’) the memory that Ruby uses at runtime. 

Aaron Patterson   

[Fullstaq Ruby: An Alternative CRuby Distribution, Optimized for Production](https://fullstaqruby.org/) — A CRuby/MRI-_based_ Ruby distribution that’s optimized for production environments out of the box, such as using the popular Jemalloc and malloc_trim patches. [GitHub repo.](https://github.com/fullstaq-labs/fullstaq-ruby-server-edition) 

Hongli Lai   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/94c5a08d.png)](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=RubyWeeklyPrimary) 

[eBook: Best Practices for Optimizing Postgres Query Performance](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=RubyWeeklyPrimary) — Learn how to get a 3x performance improvement on your Postgres database and 500x reduced data loaded from disk in this free pganalyze eBook. 

pganalyze sponsor   

[Ruby Processes and Threads: Configuring a Web Server](http://jakeyesbeck.com/2019/06/18/ruby-processes-and-threads/) — A look at the effects of increasing _threads_ vs increasing _processes_ vs increasing _both_ upon the performance of Web applications. 

Jake Yesbeck   

[Using Multiple Databases with Active Record in Rails 6+](https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_multiple_databases.html) — Rails 6 is adding the ability to [work with multiple databases](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/05/23/rails-6-multiple-databases/) in a single app out of the box and the official _Rails Guide_ on the topic is coming along nicely. 

Ruby on Rails Guides   

[Whenever 1.0: Cron Jobs, but for Ruby](https://github.com/javan/whenever) — Whenever makes it easy to write and deploy cron jobs using a Ruby DSL (e.g. `every 3.hours do ...`) which is then converted into cron syntax. 

Javan Makhmali  

💻 Jobs  

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Afrikrea Marketplace   

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Wyzant   

[Wanted: Curious Developers with ❤️](https://www.keyvalues.com/carbon-five) — Stagnating? Check C5 out: New projects, tech, and challenges perfectly paired with kind and brilliant people in SF, LA, NYC, CHA. 

Carbon Five   

[Land a New Dev Job on Vettery](https://www.vettery.com/tech?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=cooper-rubyweekly&utm_term=tech&utm_content=grouped&utm_campaign=ad-77583) — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. 

Vettery  

📘 Articles & Tutorials  

[Scaling Your Ruby Service Objects with LightService](https://medium.com/wip-it-ship-it-thoughts-from-loadup-engineering/scaling-your-ruby-service-objects-with-lightservice-3e494cf44b99?sk=e47206353e5c500f7c0c3e6e3ffb3888) — The [light-service](https://github.com/adomokos/light-service) gem implements the Railway (or, some might say, Interactor) pattern. 

Riaz Virani   

[A Repeatable, Step-by-Step Process for Writing Rails Integration Tests with Capybara](https://www.codewithjason.com/repeatable-step-step-process-writing-rails-integration-tests-capybara/) — If you’re having TDD-paralysis, this is helpful. 

Jason Swett   

[Earn Passive Revenue for Your Ruby Projects with 2 Lines of Code](https://codefund.io/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cp-rw&utm_term=2019-06-20) 

CodeFund sponsor   

[Rails 6 Adds `Enumerable#index_with`](https://blog.bigbinary.com/2019/06/17/rails-6-adds-enumerable-index_with.html) — No more `map` with `to_h`. 

Amit Choudhary   

[Quick Tip: A Rails Middleware to Change The Log Level At Runtime](https://nebulab.it/blog/rails-middleware-change-log-level/) 

Mattia Roccoberton   

[The Difference between RSpec, Capybara and Cucumber](https://www.codewithjason.com/difference-rspec-capybara-cucumber/) — Aimed at _beginners_ to whom these tools may be entirely new. 

Jason Swett   

[A Look at Node.js for Rails Lovers](https://medium.com/6overground/node-js-for-rails-lovers-d3c617f55bec) — If you’re from a Ruby background and haven’t even played with Node.js, this will help paint a little of the picture. 

Craig Phares   

[How I Test JavaScript-Heavy Rails Apps](https://www.codewithjason.com/test-javascript-heavy-rails-applications/) 

Jason Swett  

🔧 Code & Tools  

[RubyGems 3.0.4 Released](https://blog.rubygems.org/2019/06/14/3.0.4-released.html) — 3.0.4 gains TruffleRuby support. The 2.7 branch gets a new release too with [2.7.10](https://blog.rubygems.org/2019/06/14/2.7.10-released.html). 

RubyGems Blog   

[Timeliness: Fast Date/Time Parsing for the 'Control Freak'](https://github.com/adzap/timeliness) — An interesting alternative to `time/parse` for working with formatted dates ([Chronic](https://github.com/mojombo/chronic) is still a great option if you need to support natural language). 

Adam Meehan   

[Monitoring and Distributed Tracing for Ruby Apps](https://www.datadoghq.com/dg/apm/ruby-tracing/?utm_source=Advertisement&utm_medium=CooperPress&utm_campaign=CooperPress-RubyWeeklyS) — Trace real requests from end-to-end to identify latency or errors in your Ruby applications with Datadog APM. Try Datadog free. 

Datadog APM sponsor   

[reCAPTCHA 5.0: ReCaptcha Helpers for Ruby Apps](https://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha) — A way to more easily use Google’s popular (but often controversial) CAPTCHA service from Ruby apps, including both v2 and v3 variants. 

Jason L Perry   

[Shoryuken 5: A Super Efficient Amazon SQS Thread Based Message Processor](https://github.com/phstc/shoryuken) — It’s neat to see so many mature, established Ruby libraries getting updates lately. 

Pablo Cantero   

[fog 2.2: The Ruby Cloud Services Library](http://fog.io/) — A way to manage cloud services (storage, DNS, compute, etc.) in a relatively abstracted, agnostic way. 

Wesley Beary and Contributors   

[Phrasing: Let Admins Edit Phrases Inline on Your Rails Apps](https://github.com/infinum/phrasing) 

Infinum         

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