tmm1/rbtrace

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1726 stars · 73 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

rbtrace is a Ruby gem and CLI tool that lets you trace method calls inside another running Ruby process in real time, similar to strace but for Ruby code. It supports multiple tracing modes (firehose, slow calls, specific methods, GC, memory, backtraces) with minimal overhead, making it safe for production use.

Use cases

• trace method calls in a running ruby process
• find slow methods in production ruby code
• debug a hung ruby process by dumping backtraces
• trace garbage collections and memory stats of a ruby app
• trace activerecord and io calls in a rails process
• watch what a ruby process is doing in real time

When to choose

• you need to inspect a live Ruby MRI process without restarting it
• you want low-overhead method-level tracing safe for production
• you need to diagnose slow methods or hangs in a running Ruby app

When to avoid

• you use JRuby or another non-MRI Ruby implementation
• you need sampling-based CPU profiling with flamegraphs rather than targeted tracing
• you need tracing for languages other than Ruby

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

tracing monitoring developer-tools benchmarking developer-tools performance cli ruby ruby strace method-tracing production-debugging profiling command-line debugging linux macos

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