Let me start by stating the fact that I consider myself a ruby / rails novice (above newb, just enought to be dangerous, perhaps ... :) ) I have an issue that relates to the ruby-openx gem, which allows ruby to talk to an OpenX ad-server via XMLRPC, However, I think my problem is kind of a more basic problem related to Rails, but I am sure it is also probably due to the way that certain things are implemented in the gem, so I''m hopeful I can get some basic guidance here on a problem that has me stumped. OpenX::Services::Base has a section of code that the other modules / classes in the openx gem use when they extend this base class to retrieve the connection to the OpenX server that looks like this: @@connection = nil ... def connection= c @@connection = c end def connection unless @@connection and @@connection.id @@connection = Session.new(configuration[''url'']) @@connection.create( configuration[''username''], configuration[''password''] ) end @@connection end The connection is saved as a class variable, and evidently in Rails, at least in production mode or when config.cache_classes = true, classes appear to persist past an initial request so they don''t have to be reloaded on every request. The OpenX XMLRPC API expects authenticated sessions to pass back a session id that is retrieved when you successfully login via the XMLRPC API. The OpenX::Services::Session class handles this just fine. However, what ends up happening is that the session times out due to lack of activity, and the XMLRPC API does not provide a way to tell if a session is expired or not, so it typically causes 500 internal server errors in the Rails app that''s trying to communicate with OpenX. What I would like to do is basically have a private copy of the openx classes that exists only during a rails request and do not persist past the end of the request, independent of the config.cache_classes setting. I believe this would solve the problem well enough for me to be able to use as a work-around. Is it possible to do in Rails what I am asking? I think the reason this is not an issue with the library as written is that it was not written with Rails usage in mind, but for usage with either a cron job or a CLI ruby script instead; however, I have a need for it to operate properly in a Rails environment. I''m not keen on either re-writing the gem code, nor am I interested in keeping the session alive via a cron job, as that''s a hack IMO, and not a solution. So, if anyone has any thoughts, I''d love to hear them. Thanks. The gem''s code can be found at http://github.com/aasmith/openx, for anyone who is curious.