Existing Ruby tooling is quite helpful when investigating memory leaks if and when we can reproduce them on our development machine or staging environment. But what about those cases when the memory leak only really shows up in Production? Perhaps over a long time period?

In this talk, we introduce the ruby_memprofiler_pprof heap profiling gem, showing how low-overhead heap sampling can be implemented and used to investigate memory leaks in production. We also discuss early production wins when using this technique at Zendesk.