

Ruby's rmagick Gem looking for a maintainer - andrewvc
https://github.com/rmagick/rmagick/blob/master/README

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philjackson
I've never really liked the term "maintainer" sort of implies to me that the
role is going to be monotonous patching, fire fighting and bug fixing rather
than that _and_ influencing the product's direction with the design and
implementation of new features. I think "lead developer" would be a better
phrase.

~~~
technomancy
Lead developer implies a lot more work. I'm sure they'd be happy to get a lead
developer, but at minimum they need someone to just let the patches flow, dig
through bug reports, and put out releases at the right time.

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sohooo
Slightly off topic: for quick & common image manipulation stuff, there's also
mini_magick: <http://github.com/probablycorey/mini_magick>

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pilif
IMHO, there's a huge difference between calling a C library directly and
shelling out to an external process.

mini_magick uses Subexec which in turn causes a fork and exec and might,
depending on how ruby's backtick operator work, also start a shell which in
turn does another exec for the specific ImageMagick binary.

The process startup time alone is a significant overhead and so is the
additional memory usage.

In the old days, when I was maintaining a mail server for a free web mail
service, I remember the lengths I went through to prevent my MTA from forking
for mail delivery due to the huge cost of launching another process.

~~~
towelrod
I use RMagick for a rails based image repository, and I have to shell out to
run the RMagick code because of memory problems. When I used to keep it all in
the rails process, those guys would get up to the 2-3G range over the course
of a couple of days.

I'll have to check out minimagick, it might be cleaner than what I am doing
now.

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andrewvc
Have you tried manually calling GC.start with rmagick

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towelrod
In this particular application, I have to inspect PDF and TIFF files that
might have hundreds of pages or frames. These files can be over 100MB easily.
Running those through RMagick makes the process blow up to enormous sizes.
Even if the memory gets garbage collected, Solaris doesn't really release it.

Its just safer to keep it in a different process.

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aditya
Yep, could someone take this over? And, also fix all the memory leaks while
you're at it, thanks!
([http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=rmagick+leak))

~~~
pilif
What kind of an attitude is this? If you care so much about the memory leaks,
fix them yourself. It's open source after all.

Requesting bugs fixed this way is bad in a normal situation, but doing so as
an answer to a call for help to keep the project moving forward is
disgraceful.

