connection_pool

Generic connection pooling for Ruby.

MongoDB has its own connection pool. ActiveRecord has its own connection pool. This is a generic connection pool that can be used with anything, e.g. Redis, Dalli and other Ruby network clients.

Install

gem install connection_pool

Notes

• Connections are eager created when the pool is created.
• There is no provision for repairing or checking the health of a connection; connections should be self-repairing. This is true of the dalli and redis clients.

Usage

Create a pool of objects to share amongst the fibers or threads in your Ruby application:

@memcached = ConnectionPool.new(:size => 5, :timeout => 5) { Dalli::Client.new }

Then use the pool in your application:

@memcached.with do |dalli|
  dalli.get('some-count')
end

If all the objects in the connection pool are in use, with will block until one becomes available. If no object is available within :timeout seconds, with will raise a Timeout::Error.

Optionally, you can specify a timeout override using the with-block semantics:

@memcached.with(:timeout => 2.0) do |dalli|
  dalli.get('some-count')
end

This will only modify the resource-get timeout for this particular invocation. This is useful if you want to fail-fast on certain non critical sections when a resource is not available, or conversely if you are comfortable blocking longer on a particular resource. This is not implemented in the below ConnectionPool::Wrapper class.

You can use ConnectionPool::Wrapper to wrap a single global connection, making it easier to port your connection code over time:

$redis = ConnectionPool::Wrapper.new(:size => 5, :timeout => 3) { Redis.connect }
$redis.sadd('foo', 1)
$redis.smembers('foo')

The Wrapper uses method_missing to checkout a connection, run the requested method and then immediately check the connection back into the pool. It's not high-performance so you'll want to port your performance sensitive code to use with as soon as possible.

$redis.with do |conn|
  conn.sadd('foo', 1)
  conn.smembers('foo')
end

Once you've ported your entire system to use with, you can simply remove ::Wrapper and use a simple, fast ConnectionPool.

Author

Mike Perham, @mperham, http://mikeperham.com