Ruby daemon process to keep objects alive for transient Ruby instances

Question

Does Ruby offer a mechanism to share variables (more importantly, class objects and any other data abstractions I deem useful for that matter) between different running Ruby processes?

For example if I have a class instantiated, initialized and carefully tuned to a certain state, I want that state to sort of globally be available to all my otherwise independent Ruby and Irb runs throughout the day, outliving the lifetime of the process that initially used it.

One scenario I'm now considering to effectively address this problem is to create a micro Ruby script acting merely as a keeper of my chosen persistent objects and variables for a day, and daemonize it with the daemons gem or similar. Set-up 1st in the morning, tear-down at night at the end of all things.

Throughout the day many instances of another Ruby program--the one containing my actual business logic--would come and go yet be able to use and manipulate my chosen objects kept alive in the daemon process above.

Should I be studying how to serialize complex objects to disk? (actually prefer RAM not disk since it's temporary for a period anyway, and recreating it only costs much time)

Answer 1

You're probably looking for something like memcache (Gem) or redis (Gem).

You may also be interested in redis-objects.

Answer 2

The maglev implementation of Ruby seems to be perfect for your needs as it provides persistent distributed Ruby objects.

The MagLev VM takes full advantage of GemStone/S JIT to native code performance, distributed shared cache, fully ACID transactions, and enterprise class NoSQL data management capabilities to provide a robust and durable programming platform. It can transparently manage a much larger amount (terabytes) of data and code than will fit in memory. There are no restrictions on what types of objects, classes, blocks, threads or continuations that can be stored and executed.

But it might be a bit overkill depending on the size of your project.