Cached instance variables in ApplicationController in Rails 2.3.5?

Rails
1

Hi there, I’ve noticed a strange problem in my app that seems to only
occur under passenger when passenger is restarted for a few minutes:

As most people do, I have cached regularly called methods in
ApplicationController like so:

def context
return @context if @context

case request.path
when /^\/admin/
  :admin
when /^\/manage/
  @context = :manage
else
  @context = nil
end

end

It’s a normal pattern, return @context if that exists, otherwise
calculate it based upon the URL. I’d expect the normal behaviour to be
that this gets calculated once per request the first time context is
called, and then it would return @context from then on.

The problem is that it seems like these instance variables are leaking
between requests. I get errors relating to @context still being :admin
even though the request path isn’t an admin path. The only reason for
this seems to be that the variables are being kept around for the next
request. The problem seems to go away after passenger has been running
for a few minutes.

Since this problem seems quite ethereal and hard to pin down I thought
I’d post this here and see if anyone else has had any problems like
this?

Looking forward to hearing from you :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Brendon