I wrote a utility that helps find areas where you could optimize your program using a frozen string instead of a string literal, it's called [let_it_go](https://github.com/schneems/let_it_go). After going through the output and adding `.freeze` I was able to eliminate the creation of 1,114 string objects on EVERY request to [codetriage](codetriage.com). How does this impact execution?

To look at memory:

```ruby
require 'get_process_mem'

mem = GetProcessMem.new
GC.start
GC.disable
1_114.times { " " }
before = mem.mb

after = mem.mb
GC.enable
puts "Diff: #{after - before} mb"

```

Creating 1,114 string objects results in `Diff: 0.03125 mb` of RAM allocated on every request. Or 1mb every 32 requests.

To look at raw speed:

```ruby
require 'benchmark/ips'

number_of_objects_reduced = 1_114

Benchmark.ips do |x|
  x.report("freeze")    { number_of_objects_reduced.times { " ".freeze } }
  x.report("no-freeze") { number_of_objects_reduced.times { " " } }
end
```

We get the results

```
Calculating -------------------------------------
              freeze     1.428k i/100ms
           no-freeze   609.000  i/100ms
-------------------------------------------------
              freeze     14.363k (± 8.5%) i/s -     71.400k
           no-freeze      6.084k (± 8.1%) i/s -     30.450k
```

Now we can do some maths:

```ruby
ips = 6_226k # iterations / 1 second
call_time_before = 1.0 / ips # seconds per iteration 

ips = 15_254 # iterations / 1 second
call_time_after = 1.0 / ips # seconds per iteration 

diff = call_time_before - call_time_after

number_of_objects_reduced * diff * 100

# => 0.4530373333993266 miliseconds saved per request
```

So we're shaving off 1 second of execution time for every 220 requests. 

Is this going to be an insane speed boost to any Rails app: nope. Should we merge it: yep. 

p.s. If you know of a method call that doesn't modify a string input such as [String#gsub](https://github.com/schneems/let_it_go/blob/b0e2da69f0cca87ab581022baa43291cdf48638c/lib/let_it_go/core_ext/string.rb#L37) please [give me a pull request to the appropriate file](https://github.com/schneems/let_it_go/blob/b0e2da69f0cca87ab581022baa43291cdf48638c/lib/let_it_go/core_ext/string.rb#L37), or open an issue in LetItGo so we can track and freeze more strings. 

Keep those strings Frozen

![](https://www.dropbox.com/s/z4dj9fdsv213r4v/let-it-go.gif?dl=1)