Question

I would like to run a script indefinitely. It look likes my current script, as represented below, causes a memory leak. In addition I would like to retain the @time_value array since I need to cycle through the values for each new run.

  class Data

    def initialize
      first_method
      @time_value = [30, 60, 90]
    end

    def first_method

      # get some data; takes about 1 hour
      second_method
    end

    def second_method
      #process the data
      first_method
    end
  end

  d = Data.new

Answer 1

Perpetual recursion may not only continue to consume memory but will eventually fail with a stack overflow. Change your indefinite processing to a simple loop.

class Data
  def initialize
    @time_value = [30, 60, 90]
  end

  def run_forever
    while true
      first_method
      second_method
    end
  end

  def first_method
    # get some data; takes about 1 hour
  end

  def second_method
    #process the data
  end
end

Data.new.run_forever