New Relic causing memory leak/bloat?

Question

I've been tearing my hair out trying to pinpoint the cause of the memory my app is using continually growing, to the point where in production on heroku it fails and goes down.

After some pretty extensive research, using Top to observe RSIZE growing locally and using Oink to try and pinpoint I just couldn't find what was wrong.

I then found a post here that refers in one of the comments to the New Relic gem causing the same problem. As a test in development I commented out the gem and now without it my memory usage seems to be pretty stable at around 100M whereas with the gem installed it grows to the point where I can push it up to almost 1GB!! Clearly this behaviour is the root of the app going down at Heroku.

Has anyone else had this with New Relic? I'd like to continue using it, I think it's a great service but I can't if it's the root of this memory leak. Any suggestions on how I can fix it?

I'm running Rails 3.2.0 & Ruby 1.9.2

When I run Gem List it shows I have newrelic_rpm (3.6.0.83, 3.5.6.46, 3.5.5.38, 3.4.2.1, 3.4.2)

My Gemfile just references gem 'newrelic_rpm' so should I be specifying a version?

Answer 1

It seems like this may be resolved, but if you continue to see huge resource use for New Relic's Ruby agent you should definitely get in touch with Support right away. I haven't seen anything like this for the Ruby agent so it's definitely something we'd be curious to look at. https://support.newrelic.com/home