Is there something fishy with the garbage collection in 0.6 ? I'm using 2010/01/26, and the garbage just seems to pile up. Running the following code will make memory usage go straight through the roof, until SIGSEGV is received. def get_digest(file) digest = Digest::MD5.new() fil = File.open(file,'r') while(!fil.eof?) l = fil.read(READ_BUFFER_SIZE) break if l.nil? digest << l end fil.close() digest.hexdigest end I've tried various "tricks", such as setting l=nil, l="", etc, but it just seems to pile up just the same. I'm running it on a bunch of 0.5-2gb files, and it rarely gets more than 3-4 of them done before crashing. ruby 1.8.7 performs this task as expected. I'm not reporting this as a bug until i'm sure it's not "working as intended"