One of the blessings and curses of Rails development is the ability to use Rails console for debugging issues and inspecting data. The console is oftentimes used in a production environment, as it is the quickest method to glean information about any problems. With great power comes great responsibility: A command that attempts to reset a local developer environment by deleting all records of a model could easily be input into a production console. In addition, with potentially unknown clipboard data (thanks "copy-on-select"), any valid Ruby code with line breaks will automatically be executed if pasted. Any user who is deleting models, queuing up events, and updating records accidentally or intentionally should be made aware of the implications. At Salsify, we've solved this problem using a combination of open-source and home-brewed improvements and rolled them into a handy gem. Read on to learn more!

Introduction

Using vim has been one of the greatest productivity boosters for my development life. I got into vim as a lowly system administrator because it seemed to be the tool of the trade. From there, my knowledge grew and now it is my editor of choice for almost all projects. This post will go through my current setup for Ruby on Rails development. I'd like to give a huge shout out to @tpope who has created a plethora of amazing plugins all worth making a part of your daily workflow.

Here at Salsify, many of our customers regularly import large amounts of tabular product data into the system. This data needs to be sorted prior to being handled by different parts of the import process. Since we are running on Heroku, memory is a scarce resource. Sorting these arbitrarily large tabular data files requires great care. Reading all of the data into memory at once can result in extremely long execution times due to increased pressure on the Ruby garbage collector and can starve other processes on the same system of memory.

We needed a way to sort large files using a predictable amount of memory. Big data technologies like map reduce were overkill for our data scale. Creating an offline-sort gem to do this turned out to be quite the adventure and forced me to dig deeper into how Ruby manages memory, ultimately requiring a specialized heap implementation.