How to create objects prior to Rails 3 Controller call for API design

Question

I am building out a classifier API to insert into our growing platform as a stand-alone service. Basically I want to send over a piece of text and run some proprietary magic on it and respond with a json back.

Easy, right?

Issue is that there are a couple of methods I want to run on the text that require loading big hashes into memory for the operation. Right now, I have to initialize those objects every time I send a new bit of text to be operated on.

What's the best way to set up a global instance of an object that I can access within the controller without having to recreate it for every call?

Should this be in an initializer or is there a way to tie it to a specific controller?

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:34:42Z

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You could use a global variable, but seriously not recommended - be sure to read this answer by Simone Carletti. I should add - he refers to using a more robust caching solution, which is what I would recommend.

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:34

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answered Apr 30, 2012 at 18:35

Rob Cooper

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2 Comments

jmfeland Over a year ago

Rob, it's ugly but using a global like you suggested(sorta) got us to MVP. We'll leverage Simone's and Ben's suggestions as we refactor for robustness and speed.

Rob Cooper Over a year ago

Totally agree on the ugliness - as I said, my pref would be towards caching.

Ben Miller · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-01 14:11:33Z

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You have a few options here.

A. You could load the hashes into a constant on rails startup making them available to the entire application, making it load only once. You would do this by adding the constant in an initializer.

B. Load the hashes into memcached and rework your logic to query memcached instead of the hashes. This would be slightly more complex, but would be my preferred method if I was doing this. I would have a rake task that loads the file into memcached and then share the instance of memcached between instances or rails. This would reduce the amount of memory overhead required. Just make sure you set the expire to nil.

edited May 1, 2012 at 14:11

answered Apr 30, 2012 at 20:22

Ben Miller

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1 Comment

jmfeland Over a year ago

Ben, thanks! I think this is definitely my longer term solution.

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