Rails - May 2006 - Best way to do task in background in Rails

Hey everyone,

I''m still getting up to speed with Rails and Ruby. Is there a best 
practice technique for kicking off a thread to work on an activity in 
the background?

Here''s the scenario: the user performs an action that triggers e-mails 
to be sent. (I''m using ActionMailer). My app acknowledges with a
message
to the user that the messages have been sent. I would like to show the 
acknowledgment right away instead of the noticable delay I''m seeing now
depending on the number of recipients.

In my ActionController I do this:

<code>
def send_invites
  ...
  thread = Thread.new(e) do |event|
    EventMailer.send_invites(event)
  end
  thread.join ### this is what I''m curious about!
  ...
end
</code>

I''ve tested my code with Webrick and lighttpd on the Mac (Rails 1.1). 
I''ve found that without the thread.join, the code doesn''t
work--the
EventMailer doesn''t get to do its work. From what I''ve read in
the
pickaxe book, I think it''s because the spawned thread is killed when
the
invoking (Rails) thread exits. The code works with the join, but this 
defeats the purpose of what I''m trying to do as the UI thread blocks.

Am I taking the right approach here? Will my results be different under 
Apache/FastCGI?

I came across DRb and Rinda when I did a quick search. Because I don''t 
need to communicate with the background task, I''d prefer a really
simple
approach before I investigate DRb, Rinda or something else.

Thanks in advance for advice and feedback!

--Ed Lau

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Hi !

2006/5/1, Ed Lau <ted_spam@mac.com>:
> <code>
> def send_invites
>   ...
>   thread = Thread.new(e) do |event|
>     EventMailer.send_invites(event)
>   end
>   thread.join ### this is what I''m curious about!
>   ...
> end
> </code>
Look into rails_cron or plain cron.  In your controller, mark the
event as ready to send, and then use a class method in Event to do the
send:

class Event
  def sent?
    self.sent_at
  end

  def send!
    return if self.sent?
    self.class.transaction do
      EventMailer.send_invites(self)
      self.sent_at = Time.now
      self.save!
    end
  end

  def self.send_ready
    self.find_ready.send!
  end
end

You can then run this code using script/runner:

crontab -l
* * * * * /u/me/apps/rails-app/script/runner -e production
"Event.send_ready"

Using rails_cron:

class Event
  background :send_ready, :every => 1.minute
end

Hope that helps !
--
Fran?ois Beausoleil
http://blog.teksol.info/