[spectre256]

It really makes sense that something like this would be the case.

All the experts say "oh, Ruby uses lots of memory for [reason] and it can't really be fixed", so no one even tries.

Until someone comes along who is either motivated, smart, or ignorant(!) enough to try to fix it anyway, and finds that the commonly accepted answer was wrong.

This happens all the time, especially in science. Trust, but verify, I suppose.

[jashmatthews]

> All the experts say "oh, Ruby uses lots of memory for [reason] and it can't really be fixed", so no one even tries

This isn’t true at all. It’s well understood that jemalloc 3.x exhibits lower resident set size because it more readily releases pages.

This idea has been around for at least 3 years: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12236