Hello everyone, my name is David and I would like to tell you a story that started two years ago. Back in 2016 when ManageIQ was running on Rails 4.2 and the Rails 5 was in beta was when I started looking into ActionCable and WebSockets in general. I had this vision of having asynchronous notifications being emitted from long-running backend jobs that we could display on the frontend as notifications. In the meantime I had some bugs assigned to me about browser-based remote consoles. As you can guess, these consoles were also powered by WebSockets and I had a feeling that I could do some improvements in the area.

tl;dr we found a memory leak in Ruby… and it mostly wasn’t our fault!