Ruby on Rails: errors when launching threads from a controller

2008-03-19

While writing a proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails application (Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 2.0.2) I was stumped by an intermittent problem where long-lived processes would fail with the error message:

<ArgumentError: A copy of TransactionController has been removed from the module tree but is still active!>

Admittedly, I do some potentially dodgy things in this application. I initiate a transaction in a TransactionController but cannot tell in advance how long it will be until the transaction is finished – it may succeed immediately or it may take several seconds. To keep the web site visitor from waiting, the controller returns a result web page immediately and spawns a Thread to continue processing the transaction in the background. This thread updates one or more model objects as the transaction's status changes, and these model objects are derived from a plugin class.

The thread worked well in most cases, but it would fail when the transaction took longer than a few seconds. The error seemed to be triggered when the code created a new model object.

The workaround I found for this issue was to enable class caching in my development environment. This caching is enabled by default in the production environment but not in development. To enable it, I edited the config.cache_classes property in the config/environments/development.rb configuration file like so:

config.cache_classes = true

This setting disables class reloading in the development environment, which means that you must restart the server before code changes will be applied. This is a pain when you are developing an application, so I only set this option to true when it is necessary to test slow transactions.

I assume this issue is caused by Rails unloading the plugin's model classes when it does a sweep looking for changed code files. It is a shame this occurs even when no code changes have been made. And despite the fact the error message names the controller class, in my testing the error was only ever triggered by code that operated on model objects. If I removed references to the models, the thread would do its job no matter how long the transaction took.

I am no Rails expert so there is a good chance I am doing something drastically wrong. I did spend some time looking for a better way to spawn background thread tasks from a controller action, but the suggestions I found involved running separate processes on the server machine and communicating with them via sockets or shared database tables – an arrangement that isn't much less hacky than what I'm currently doing.

If you know of a saner way of doing this, please let me know in the comments.

Tags: Coding

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