Strange production vs. development behavior difference

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am running into something that has me stunned.

I have a wizard like application that works perfectly well in development but does not in production. The code has nothing environment specific going on and the same DB is used in both modes so I know the problems are not being caused by the data.

The specific problem I have is that I am supposed to display a section of the page only if the same SSN is in the DB already. The SSN is already in the DB so the page should always display.

The funny thing is that the page works as expected for both creation and update in development but only for creation in production.

Furthermore, there is something really funky going on. If I add this at the beginning of my action:

    render :text => 'in my action'     return

the development environment will execute it with no problem but the production environment completely ignores. It is like if I had made no changes to the code. And in case you were going to ask, yes I made sure (about 10 times) that the web server (Mongrel) had been restarted when running in production.

I have been looking around the whole day and I can't find anything that would give me a clue about what the problem might be.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rails is NOT installed in vendors Ruby: 1.8.6 Gems: *** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.3.5, 2.2.2) actionpack (2.3.5, 2.2.2, 1.13.6, 1.13.3) actionwebservice (1.2.6, 1.2.3) activerecord (2.3.5, 2.2.2, 1.15.6, 1.15.3) activerecord-oracle-adapter (1.0.0.9250) activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter (1.2.3) activeresource (2.3.5, 2.2.2) activesupport (2.3.5, 2.3.3, 2.2.2, 1.4.4, 1.4.2) archive-tar-minitar (0.5.2) builder (2.1.2) calendar_date_select (1.15, 1.13) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0) color (1.4.0) cucumber (0.6.2) diff-lcs (1.1.2) fastthread (1.0.1) fxri (0.3.6) fxruby (1.6.6) gem_plugin (0.2.3) hoe (1.8.2) hpricot (0.4) ibm_db (1.1.1) json_pure (1.2.0) linecache (0.43) log4r (1.0.5) mongrel (1.1.5) mysql (2.7.3) paginator (1.1.1) pdf-writer (1.1.8) polyglot (0.2.9) rack (1.0.1) rails (2.3.5, 2.2.2) rake (0.8.7, 0.8.3) rspec (1.3.0) ruby-debug-base (0.10.3, 0.10.2) ruby-debug-ide (0.4.5, 0.3.1) rubyforge (1.0.3, 1.0.2, 1.0.1) rubygems-update (1.3.5, 1.3.1) sources (0.0.1) sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1) term-ansicolor (1.0.4) transaction-simple (1.4.0) treetop (1.4.3) win32-clipboard (0.4.1) win32-dir (0.3.1) win32-eventlog (0.4.3) win32-file (0.5.3) win32-file-stat (1.2.3) win32-process (0.5.1) win32-sapi (0.1.3) win32-sound (0.4.0) win32console (1.2.0) windows-pr (0.6.2)

2

I am running into something that has me stunned.

I have a wizard like application that works perfectly well in

development but does not in production. The code has nothing

environment specific going on and the same DB is used in both modes so

I know the problems are not being caused by the data.

The specific problem I have is that I am supposed to display a section

of the page only if the same SSN is in the DB already. The SSN is

already in the DB so the page should always display.

The funny thing is that the page works as expected for both creation

and update in development but only for creation in production.

Furthermore, there is something really funky going on. If I add this

at the beginning of my action:

render :text => 'in my action'

return

the development environment will execute it with no problem but the

production environment completely ignores. It is like if I had made no

changes to the code. And in case you were going to ask, yes I made

sure (about 10 times) that the web server (Mongrel) had been restarted

when running in production.

I have been looking around the whole day and I can’t find anything

that would give me a clue about what the problem might be.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Pepe, as of Rails 2.3.5, the difference between the production and development environments

are as follows:

  • caching (by default)

  • development: Off

  • production: On

  • reloading of models, views, and controllers on each request (by default)

  • development: On

  • production: Off

Good luck,

-Conrad

3

Thanks Conrad,

I knew about the caching and reloading differences, that is the reason I have been stopping and starting the web server every time while debugging the production environment. My understanding is that the web server will work with the application as if it were the first time it "saw" it every time it is re-started. If that is true, why doesn't it take the changes I make to my action? Is there something else I should do or look up that might be causing this behavior? Has anybody encountered a similar problem? If there is something kept "in memory" that might be causing the problem, where to look?

Thank you.

Pepe

4

These kind of errors normally belong to the "editing the wrong file" bag. Can you double-check that the render :text is there with less(1) in the production machine? That that tree is the one being served? That you are pointing your browser to the correct machine?

5

Xavier,

I had thought about that long ago and I was sure I was working with the right application. I don't have any other application with the same name anywhere in the system and the changes I was making to the views for debugging purposes were being processed just fine.

However... I had a copy of the old controller file in the controllers folder. I had given it the same name and appended '_save' at the end. And that is what the problem was. The old version of the controller was probably being processed by Rails after the newer one was and the definition of the class was most likely being overlaid.

What I don't understand now is why when I changed the newer version of the controller Rails took the changes in the development environment. Shouldn't the controller class have been always replaced by the older version even in development? I wish I knew more about the internal of Rails to understand this. There is so much to learn...

Your comment made me remember that the class name in both files was still the same and since classes are never closed in Ruby that should be causing the problem. I removed the older version of the controller form the controllers folder and now it all works as expected.

Thank you very much!

Pepe

6

Classes are loaded in different ways in production versus development - in particular in production it will load pretty much every file in your app on startup, whereas in development it loads things as needed (and this mechanism would never cause foo_controller_save.rb to be loaded (unless you wrote FooControllerSave in your app.).

Fred

7

Thanks Fred, that explains it.

Thank you very much to all of you for your help.

Pepe