Interesting Things

• On Friday someone suggested that Solr offers per-queue transactionality. Further testing indicates this isn’t the case. If a series of changes are entered on one queue and a commit occurs on another queue, all pending changes across all queues are committed and reflected in the index. Consider yourselves warned.

• Solr has an optimize command to reduce the size of the index. This is important to performance because Solr attempts to hold the full index in memory. Using the optimize command can push index size down to 20% of pre-optimized levels. If you’re using Sunspot to interface with Solr, it doesn’t expose the optimize command. Here’s a way you can call it directly:

Sunspot.session.session.send(:connection).update RSolr::Message::Generator.new.build { |b| b.optimize }

• If you’re using nginx on EngineYard, you might be surprised when your configuration changes don’t take effect for https:// users. EngineYard keeps ssl configuration in a separate file — look for [project name].ssl.conf

• We’ve reached the halfway point for GoGaRuCo ticket sales. If you are thinking of coming, now is the time to get your tickets. Sarah Mei has been added to the speaker list.

• Some of our folks using delayed job were having trouble because they needed access to the RAILS_ENV. They modified their delayed_job start and restart commands to export the RAILS_ENV into the environment. When exported, the ENV value is inherited by the daemonized child process:

cd ./project_root && export RAILS_ENV=production && delayed_job start