[Rubygems-developers] Installing Rubygems in User's Local Directory to fix Gem on Memory-Limited Systems

[Ryan Davis]

On Jun 8, 2007, at 10:53 , Randy Parker wrote:

> The Joyent / Textdrive shared host "kientz" is supposed to restrict  
> memory in my Solaris container to 100MB.  It looks like that is not  
> enough to use gem.
>
> My other shared hosting accounts are Textdrive's FreeBSD,  
> restricted to 48MB, and Site5's Linux, restricted to 50MB.  I think  
> it is safe to assume that they will continue to fail with 0.9.4.2  
> as well.

Maybe it is me, but I'm not sure this is a problem with rubygems. I  
don't feel it is trying to be a works-everywhere type of platform.  
These TxD slices you're using have less RAM than most cell phones  
these days. No really. It'll be hard for you to run a rails app on  
them regardless.

That said, I think you're looking at the problem incorrectly. You're  
not supposed to DO anything on those slices. They're too thin to be  
practical for much of anything but a single task. In your case, you  
should be rsyncing in a rails app directory that includes vendor/ 
rails and all the gems it would be using frozen in vendor as well  
(see rake rails:freeze:gems and other solutions in various blogs).  
You should be 100% self-reliant and self-contained. As I understand  
it, the latest capistrano can deploy via rsync.