Seems to block the controller with recent rails

[til]

When I put something like this in a controller action:

 run_later do
    logger.info "before run_later sleep"
    sleep 10
    logger.info "finished run_later"
  end

then the request takes 10s until it returns anything. The output in the log all appears at once at the end of the request.

I would have expected the controller to render immediately and see the message "finished" after approx. 10 seconds appear in the log.

I'm on ruby 1.8.7 on linux, tried both rails 2.3.3 and a blank project with rails 2.3.4, tried it both in development and production mode and with webrick and mongrel, the request was always blocked. Hm, not sure if I really tried all 8 possible combinations, but at least in 2.3.3 on production with both webservers.

[roidrage]

The problem is that using sleep as a reference really is no good, because it tends to hold back everything in certain circumstances. In development mode will always stall because it holds back the Rails cleanup of the loaded classes. I just tested it in production mode, and it seems to work fine for me. Please try running something that relates to your application's logic with run_later. If that doesn't seem to work properly, then it's a problem.

[til]

I tried it now again with sleep, some WWW::Mechanize activity and then email sending via gmail smtp and both worked fine from within the run_later block and the controller action returned immediately. Not sure anymore under which exact circumstances I saw that error but I cannot reproduce it anymore, sorry about the noise.