Hi all:

I am working on a Ruby on Rails project on Windows. I have Ruby 1.86 and Rails 2.35 installed. Everything is fine until I tried to implement a comet process. I have the following code written to respond to a long poll javascript request. But everytime this function is called, it will hang the whole rails server, no second request can get in, until the timeout. (I know there is juggernaut, but I like to implement one myself first :)

Is this due to my server setup? The project will be deployed on a linux server with Ngix and Passenger setup, will it suffer the same problem?

def comet_hook
    timeout(5) do
      while true do
        key = 'station_' + station_id.to_s + '_message_lastwrite'      
        if Rails.cache.exist?(key) 
          @cache_time = DateTime.parse(Rails.cache.read(key))
          if @cache_time > hook_start
            @messages = @station.messages_posted_after(hook_start)
            hook_start = @cache_time
            break
          end 
        end
    end
    ...
end

Also with Rails memory store cache, I keep getting "cannot modify frozen object" error, so the above script only worked for me when I switched to File cache. :(