MemHealth

A Rails engine for monitoring memory health, detecting growth patterns (leaks & bloats) and memory swap operations. Helps you identify requests that consume high amounts of RAM and is compatible with Heroku.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "memhealth"

Use initializer /config/memhealth.rb to configure Redis connection:

MemHealth.configure do |config|
  config.redis_url = ENV.fetch("REDIS_URL", "redis://localhost:6379/0")
end

Enable memory tracking via ENV variable:

MEM_HEALTH_ENABLED=true

Dashboard setup

Mount the engine in your routes within an authenticated section:

# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # ... other routes ...

  # Mount within authenticated admin section
  authenticate :admin_user do
    mount MemHealth::Engine, at: "/admin/memhealth"
  end
end

Features

Real-time memory usage monitoring
Track highest memory consuming requests
Account-level tracking for multi-tenant apps
Redis-based data storage
Web dashboard for viewing statistics
Configurable thresholds and limits

Heroku Memory Issues

If you're getting R14 - Memory quota exceeded errors, it means your application is using swap memory. Swap uses the disk to store memory instead of RAM. Disk speed is significantly slower than RAM, so page access time is greatly increased. This leads to a significant degradation in application performance. An application that is swapping will be much slower than one that is not. No one wants a slow application, so getting rid of R14 Memory quota exceeded errors on your application is very important.

MemHealth helps you identify which specific requests are consuming excessive memory, allowing you to pinpoint and fix the root cause of these performance issues.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

Configure Memhealth using environment variables:

Environment Variable	Description	Default Value
`MEM_HEALTH_ENABLED`	Enable/disable memory tracking	`false`
`MEM_HEALTH_SKIP_REQUESTS`	Number of initial requests to skip (avoids class loading overhead)	`10`
`MEM_HEALTH_MEMORY_THRESHOLD_MB`	Minimum memory difference (MB) to track a request	`1`
`MEM_HEALTH_RAM_BEFORE_THRESHOLD`	Minimum RAM usage (MB) before tracking (prevents tracking low-memory requests)	`0`
`MEM_HEALTH_MAX_STORED_URLS`	Maximum number of URLs to store in Redis	`20`
`MEM_HEALTH_REDIS_KEY`	Name of environment variable containing Redis URL (e.g., `REDISCLOUD_URL`)	`REDIS_URL`

The gem will read the Redis connection URL from the environment variable specified in MEM_HEALTH_REDIS_KEY, falling back to REDIS_URL if not specified.

ActiveAdmin Integration

To add Memhealth to your ActiveAdmin Operations menu, add this to your ActiveAdmin initializer:

# config/initializers/active_admin.rb
ActiveAdmin.setup do |config|
  # ... other config ...

  config.namespace :admin do |admin|
    admin.build_menu do |menu|
      # ... other menu items ...
      menu.add label: "MemHealth", url: "/admin/memhealth", parent: "Operations"
    end
  end
end

Console Usage

# View statistics
MemHealth::Tracker.print_stats

# Get top memory consuming URLs
MemHealth::Tracker.top_memory_urls

# Clear all data
MemHealth::Tracker.clear_all_data

License

The gem is available as open source under the MIT License.

memhealth

Development

Runtime