I’m running into a frustrating combination of Rails-related issues that are impacting my Texas Roadhouse menu website, and I’m hoping someone here might help me figure out what I’m missing. The project is built on Rails 7 with import maps, Turbo, and Stimulus, and everything worked smoothly for months. But recently, some pages especially the menu detail pages that contain images, nutritional info, and category filters— have started loading inconsistently. Sometimes they render instantly, and other times they take several seconds, which makes me suspect a caching configuration issue or something odd happening with the fragment caches I’m using.
On top of that, I’ve been experiencing strange behavior with the asset pipeline. Even after precompiling assets and clearing tmp/cache, updates to my CSS and JS don’t always reflect on production unless I manually restart the server. I’m deploying with Capistrano, and the process finishes without errors, but Rails seems to continue serving older digested assets for random users. This is especially noticeable on my Texas Roadhouse menu pages where layout changes, color tweaks, or filter button enhancements sometimes appear only for certain visitors, and not for others. I’m not sure if this is sprockets-related, CDN caching, or something misconfigured in my environment files.
Another major issue involves ActiveStorage. My site uses ActiveStorage (backed by Amazon S3) for storing menu item images and some 3D-rendered food assets. Recently, some images fail to load with 403 errors, even though permissions on S3 look correct and the URLs haven’t expired. Worse, thumbnails generated by Rails sometimes appear extremely low resolution, as if the variant processor is failing silently. Regenerating variants locally works fine, but production keeps producing inconsistent results. This is making several Texas Roadhouse menu items look blurry, which obviously isn’t ideal for a food-focused website.
I’m also noticing that some Turbo Streams aren’t updating consistently across the menu admin panel. When adding or editing menu items, the Turbo Stream broadcast occasionally works perfectly, but other times the UI doesn’t update unless I manually refresh the page. I’m using Action Cable with Redis, and the server logs show broadcasts happening normally. Still, clients sometimes don’t receive the updated streams. I’m unsure whether this is a Redis pub/sub issue, an Action Cable configuration oversight, or a scaling problem with Puma workers.
Additionally, my background processing queue (Sidekiq) has started behaving strangely. Tasks related to image processing, data imports, and nutrition table updates occasionally get stuck in “retry” even though they never failed during testing. Logs show intermittent timeouts, but the server resources stay stable and Redis isn’t under load. For a content-heavy site like mine which is constantly adding Texas Roadhouse menu updates, new visuals, and restructuring categories stable background workers are pretty essential, so this instability is becoming a real challenge.
Overall, I’m trying to figure out if these problems stem from a deeper misconfiguration in my Rails environment, caching layers (Redis + CDN), asset management, or ActiveStorage setup. The issues appeared gradually rather than all at once, which makes them even harder to diagnose. If anyone has run into similar problems with Rails 7 environments especially regarding caching, Turbo Stream inconsistencies, or ActiveStorage variants I’d really appreciate any guidance or debugging suggestions. This project is important to me, and I need to restore stable performance to keep my Texas Roadhouse menu website functioning smoothly. Sorry for long post
Jokes aside, the issues are definitely pointing toward some deeper caching or configuration problem, so I’m going to start digging through the environment settings and CDN layers again. If anyone has run into similar Rails 7 quirks with caching, Turbo, or ActiveStorage variants, I’d really appreciate any pointers.