By Joe Damato & Aman Gupta — Everything in Ruby is an object, but what is a Ruby object? What does it look like? Where does it live? How is it born and when does it die? This talk will cover the implementation of the object heap and garbage collector in Ruby 1.8, with a focus on tools and techniques to understand memory usage, find reference leaks, and improve the performance of your Ruby applications. We'll also highlight common tricks for improving the performance of Ruby code running under MRI by reducing the memory overhead. Finally we'll look ahead to ruby 1.9 and jruby and talk about how they fix some of these issues in MRI. Less