Gimme A Break

This plugin adds a way to throttle ActiveRecord creation.

Add gimme_a_break to your model to enable the throttling. It will then not be possible to create models in quick succession. Object creation is usually very “expensive” (in time) and blocks most database servers. Database IO is usually the bottleneck in web applications, and thottling this back is a great way to increase overall availability.

An error message will be added to the base object and the object will not be valid. It’s up to you to display this error to the user. When you follow ActiveRecord convention you will be fine. The error message can be localized using the key gimme_a_break.notice with {{count}} as the timeout in seconds.

The throttle is applied per running instance. If you have two Passenger instances running, people will be able to create twice the amount of objects. This is exactly what you want, since the limit should scale linearly with the capacity of your servers. If your database keeps getting overloaded, reduce the timeout.

Options

timeout: the time to wait between creates, in seconds. Default is 6.

Prerequisites

Your model needs to have a created_at column for this to work. An index on it is highly recommended.

Installation

Rails 2:

gem 'gimme_a_break', :version => "~> 0.2.0"

Rails 3:

gem 'gimme_a_break', '>= 1.0.0'

Examples

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  gimme_a_break
end

class Tweet < ActiveRecord::Base
  gimme_a_break :timeout => 2
end