From: Kent Dahl <kentda@...>
Date: 2002-06-06T07:01:47+09:00
Subject: Re: mod_ruby and module space

Sean O'Dell wrote:
> That's the conclusion I came to here, that the first script is in an
> anonymous namespace and the loaded module seems to be in another
> namespace altogether...guess it's time to report that. 

The loaded (or required) module falls into the toplevel namespace, where
it should be. (Or requiring any library would get very messy indeed.)

BTW: A nice thing I hadn't seen anywhere in the mod_ruby documentation;
the lib/apache/ruby-debug.rb variant which outputs exception info to the
client. (It really should have been default in the installation for
mod_ruby_nubies like myself. :-)

> I just switched
> to having my scripts executed as CGI programs using command-line ruby.
> mod_ruby has some fundamental things I don't like about it, like not
> being able to completely clean up the interpreter between uses. 

Is it really that bad? I mean, the resources that take up space is
mostly compiled code, such as the required files that still lingers in
memory (and makes subsequent calls to the script faster, I would assume,
since the requires would just return at once) and whatever hasn't been
taken by a GC just yet. I wouldn't think that any other junk would float
around. But I'm not intimate with the details of mod_ruby...

> Between
> that feature and Ruby's garbage collection system, preserving resources
> seems to be a forgotten relic of ancient programming techniques or
> something.  I wish there was more focus on making things clean and tight.

I know what you mean, but as for this case, with webservers and
server-side scripts, I think that the resource-eating is fairly
proportional to the speedgains. (Now, as for running Ruby stuff on a
handheld that isn't one of the new $500 monsters, I totally agree :-))

-- 
(\[ Kent Dahl ]/)_    _~_    __[ http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~kentda/ ]___/~
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