Ruby/Mechanize Any way to drain RAM? -> failed to allocate memory - ruby

Question

I've built a code which vote for me on a website...
The Ruby script works quite well but after few minuts this script stop with this errors : link of the screen-shot
So I've inspected the windows task manager and the memory alocate to the ruby.exe grow after each loop !
here is the incriminate peace of code :
class VoteWebsite
def self.main
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Windows Mozilla'
while $stop!=true
page = agent.get 'http://website.com/vote.php'
reports_divs = page.search(".//div[#class='Pad1Color2']")
tds = reports_divs.search("td")
i = 3;j = 0;ouiboucle=0;voteboucle=0
while i < tds.length
result = tds[i].to_s.scan(/<font class="ColorRed"><b>(.*?) :<\/b><\/font>/)
type = result[0].to_s[2..-3]
k=i
case type
when "Type of vote"
j= i+1;i += 4
result2 = tds[j].to_s.scan(/<div id="btn(.*?)">/)
id = result2[0].to_s[2..-3]
monvote=define_vote($vote_type, tds[k].to_s, $vote_auto)
page2 = agent.get 'http://website.com/AJAX_Vote.php?id='+id+'&vote='+monvote
voteboucle+=1
.
.
.
else
.
.
.
end
end
end
end
end
VoteWebsite.main
I think that declaring all the variables inside the method to Global variable should fix this probleme but the code is quite big and there is planty of variables inside this method.
So is there any way (any Ruby instruction) to drain all this variable at the end of each loop ?

Answer 1

The problem came, in fact, from the history of mechanize see this answer or the Mechanize::History.clear method or even just set the Mechanize::History.max_size attribute to a reasonable value.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'mechanize'
class GetContent
def initialize url
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Windows Mozilla'
agent.history.max_size=0
while true
page = agent.get url
end
end
end
myPage = GetContent.new('http://www.nypost.com/')
hope it helps !

Answer 2

You can always force the garbage collector to kick in:
GC.start
As a note, this doesn't look very Ruby. Packing multiple statements on to one line using ; is bad form, and using $ type variables is probably a relic of it being ported from something else.
Remember that $-prefixed variables are global variables in Ruby and can cause tons of problems if used carelessly and should be reserved for very specific circumstances. The best alternative is an #-prefixed instance variable, or if you must, a declared CONSTANT.