File: README — Documentation for system

System Lock

System Lock is a system-wide critical section for ruby code. This works across multiple mongrel/thin instances across multiple servers. This also works with recursive calls to the lock by using reference counting. The information required for the lock is stored in memcached.

Requirements

Memcached Server Dalli Gem

What you need to know

1) Set this after you initialize memcached. CACHE is the instance of DALLI e.g. “CACHE = Dalli::Client.new(SERVER_LIST, = ”XXXXXX“, :password => ”XXXXXX“)”

Internaut::SystemLock.memcached_instance = CACHE

If you are in Rails you can use the following in your environment.rb:

Internaut::SystemLock.memcached_instance = Rails.cache

2) Setup your lock around the code you want to protect. The unique identifier should be something that identifies not only the code block, but in which cases you want it to be protected. For example, in this case I am using something that looks like a route or url. I want to protect this code block for all users trying to access project id 152.

Internaut::SystemLock.critical_section('/projects/152') do
  # any code that you execute in here will be serialized as long 
  # as it has the same unique code block identifier
end

API

Internaut::SystemLock.memcached_instance(MEMCACHED_INSTANCE)

Internaut::SystemLock.critical_section(unique_code_block_identifier, timeout=60)

# Timeout default 60 seconds.  Set it higher than you need it to be.

Internaut::SystemLock.disable! Internaut::SystemLock.enable! (enabled by default) Internaut::SystemLock.enabled?

Information stored in Memcached

unique_code_block_identifier => [ process_id + unique_server_id_string, reference_count ]