Ruby Version Upgrades

4 posts · Sep 2018 – Aug 2020

What this trail covers

This feature thread tracks the evolution of upgrading GitHub's core Ruby version to improve performance, maintainability, and leverage new language features. This post details the successful production deployment of GitHub on Rails 5.2.1, achieved through an iterative upgrade process that allowed for dual booting and incremental rollouts. The team also focused on addressing technical debt and contributing tooling upstream.

All GitHub trails

Aug 2020Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7This post details the strategy and execution of upgrading GitHub from Ruby 2.6 to Ruby 2.7. Key contributions include the dual-booting strategy using environment variables, monkey-patching the `Warning` module to collect and distribute deprecation warnings to owning teams, and the phased rollout process in production. It also highlights performance improvements such as reduced application boot time and decreased object allocations, as well as contributions back to the open-source community.
Sep 2019Running GitHub on Rails 6.0This post details the successful production deployment of GitHub on Rails 6.0, achieved by upgrading weekly from Rails master. It highlights GitHub engineers' contributions of over 100 pull requests to Rails 6.0, focusing on documentation, bug fixes, features, and performance improvements. It also discusses contributions to new Rails features like parallel testing and multiple databases, and the strategy of upgrading continuously to influence the framework's evolution.
Jun 2019Direct instruction marking in Ruby 2.6This post details a specific optimization in Ruby 2.6 that eliminates the need for a 'mark array' to keep literal objects alive during instruction sequence execution. Instead, Ruby 2.6 directly marks operands within the instruction sequences themselves. This change reduces memory usage by approximately 3% in the post-boot live heap for GitHub's Rails application, with no observed cost to throughput.
Sep 2018Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2This post details the year-and-a-half long process of upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2.1. It describes the dual-booting strategy using `Gemfile.lock` and `Gemfile_next.lock` to allow for incremental deployment of new Rails versions. The rollout process involved testing, phased production deploys, and monitoring exceptions and performance. Key lessons learned include upgrading early and often, keeping upgrade infrastructure in place, upstreaming tooling, avoiding private framework APIs, addressing technical debt, performing incremental upgrades, maintaining momentum, and expecting breakage. The post also highlights the benefits of the upgrade, such as addressing technical debt, removing StateMachine in favor of Active Record enums, and replacing the job runner with Active Job.
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