My favorite Ruby memory leak was in a text processing app that was extracting via regex short strings (< 50 chars) out of 10MB+ text files. The short strings w

My favorite Ruby memory leak was in a text processing app that was extracting via regex short strings (< 50 chars) out of 10MB+ text files. The short strings were apparently substring-like objects that held on the original 10MB text and indexed into it at a particular offset. Solution? Return the short_string + "" and then the GC did its thing.