I've been playing around with the Ruby/Rails cloud provider Heroku a little bit lately just to try it out. It is somewhat like Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure in the way it works since you bundle your application and push it out to the Heroku cloud for deployment. It is very easy to get things going but I ran into a few interesting items that I figured I would share.
I wrote about SOAP vs REST a few weeks ago. Today I noticed this article with a presentation about putting together Rails REST services with ActiveResource.
I'm not sure if something isn't set up correctly of if this is just a fact of life with rails but the sessions it creates never seem to go away. I think before rails 1.1 the sessions where stored in /tmp and now they are stored in the apps directory along with everything else so they is probably no internal mechanism to delete them. I only noticed because after about a month of an certain app running the disk on the machine started to fill up. After digging a little I found 50K ruby_sess.* files hanging out in the rails session directory.
Anyway it was easy enough to clean up the stale ruby_sess files by going into the rails webapp/session directory and then running the following command:
find -type f -name "ruby_sess*" -exec rm -f {} \;
I'm not sure why the app is creating sessions but it isn't something that stores state so I didn't have to worry about killing active sessions here. If you do need to worry about that you will probably want to toss a time on the find command.
After looking a little more I found a post about this that has a ruby way of cleaning up the sessions.
Tags: ruby, rails, rails session