Question

Working with a Sinatra application, and found 3 ways to run a background process:

1. Thread.new
2. Process.fork
3. Process.spawn

Figured out how to get the first two to work, but now the challenge is that the tests need to run synchronously (for a few reasons).

What is a good way to run jobs asynchronously in production, but force the tests to run synchronously? Preferably with a call in the spec_helper…?

Ruby 1.9.3, Sinatra app, RSpec.

Answer 1

Here’s what I came up with:

process_in_background { slow_method }

def process_in_background
  Rails.env == 'test' ? yield : Thread.new { yield }
end

def slow_method
  ...code that takes a long time to run...
end

I like this solution because it is transparent: it runs the exact same code, just synchronously.

Any suggestions/problems with it? Is it necessary to manage zombies? How?