updating this thread for everyone’s sake. I had to drop it into an initializers file in config/initializers and it worked.
however performance is not much better 36% of the time was just on gsub.
Thread ID: 3063488800
Total: 2.750000
%self total self wait child calls name
36.36 1.00 1.00 0.00 0.00 38508 String#gsub!
16.36 1.62 0.45 0.00 1.17 1008 Builder::XmlBase#method_missing-5
3.64 0.10 0.10 0.00 0.00 1282 Class::File#expand_path
2.55 1.15 0.07 0.00 1.08 12836 Builder::XmlBase#_escape
2.18 0.06 0.06 0.00 0.00 16 Mysql::Result#each_hash
1.82 2.14 0.05 0.00 2.09 1097 Array#each-1
1.82 0.05 0.05 0.00 0.00 12836 String#initialize_copy
1.82 0.07 0.05 0.00 0.02 1015 ActiveRecord::AttributeMethods#read_attribute
1.45 0.04 0.04 0.00 0.00 31114 Fixnum#==
1.45 0.04 0.04 0.00 0.00 14171 Symbol#to_s
1.45 0.04 0.04 0.00 0.00 2159 Hash#initialize_copy
1.45 0.04 0.04 0.00 0.00 4432 Kernel#instance_variable_set
1.09 0.20 0.03 0.00 0.17 1008 Builder::XmlBase#method_missing-6
1.09 0.03 0.03 0.00 0.00 8262 Builder::XmlMarkup#_text
1.09 0.42 0.03 0.00 0.39 1126 Hash#each
1.09 2.62 0.03 0.00 2.59 102 Array#each
1.09 0.08 0.03 0.00 0.05 2154 Class::ActiveRecord::Base#instantiate