OK, this is totally insane. First Jamis Buck hit us with Inspecting a live Ruby process article where he demonstrated a number of very interesting technics you can use in order to poke around your live Ruby process.
But then Mauricio Fernandez showed us how masters do their katas ( 型 ) in "Inspecting a live Ruby process", easier if you cheat.
I didn't know that gdb can be that powerful! I need to read more about it.
On a side note, I've just finished reading Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle and I very enjoyed it. If you followed this interesting exchange of opinions, you should definitely read this book. The author make a clear point that the raw speed of your language of choice does not matter in creating scalable solutions. Even if your application is powered by C, you still can reach a point when your single server is not able to serve all incoming requests and you need to scale your application horizontally. This book explains how.
Next on my "to read" list is Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson.
