Ruby gaining weight?

[Pete Slagle]

Recent versions of ruby18 seem to take more than 145 MB of virtual
memory to build with portupgrade or "make install clean."

I have several "classic" boxes running bind and a mail MTA on 4.11 that
are memory-limited, but otherwise work well. The main boards are maxed
out at 64 MB of RAM, and they have 128 MB of swap. The ruby build fails
 as swap space becomes exhausted.

Sure, I could reorganize the hard drives on these boxes to add more
swap, but nothing else needs more that a few KB. Moreover, rebuilding
the hard drives is to be avoided since these machines are part of a
basic infrastructure that has been stable for years.

Is ruby really that piggy, or do I just have a configuration issue?