Remove `free -m` rspec report
I don't see that this report provides any actionable data or data which is easy to interpret, we don't measure memory pressure during the spec execution, and nobody used this report until we started to review our tools.
My suggestion would be to remove it. We may consider running something similar, but with_memory_allocations
, to measure the memory pressure during the spec executing, which is much more interesting and where we could meaningful borderlines.
The problem with free -m
being run after each spec group is that it would detect only a very specific scenario: the memory is being requested into Ruby Heap at some point, and it never recovered. And, as we know, it doesn't mean a memory leak - Ruby may hold into the memory to avoid system calls, keeping it available for usage, while from the "outside" (OS) it would look like it is not free.
More on this report in #350362 (closed) and #352020.