Rack Application Initializes On Every Request

[Frank Ficnar]

Is it normal that my 'initialize' method is called on every request to
my Rack application (non-Rails)?

Rack' 1.3.5 didn't do this ... it started with the 1.4.0 update.

Frank

[James Tucker]

Can you provide some more information?

Rack doesn't instantiate anything itself.

If you're using Rack::Builder, and you're talking about a middleware, then it's likely you forgot to call #to_app on the Builder instance before passing it to the handler.

[Frank Ficnar]

I'm not using Rack::Builder directly ... unless it's being used behind
the scenes.

I've got a config..ru as follows ...

#\ --warn --port 8008 --pid ./rack.pid
require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler/setup'

require 'rack'

require 'ruby_app/rack/application'
require 'ruby_app/rack/route'
require 'ruby_app/version'

use Rack::ShowExceptions
use Rack::Session::Pool
use Rack::Reloader
use Rack::ContentLength

map '/favicon.ico' do
run Rack::File.new(File.join(RubyApp::ROOT, %w[resources
favicon.ico]))
end

map '/ruby_app/resources' do
run Rack::File.new(File.join(RubyApp::ROOT, %w[resources]))
end

map '/' do
use RubyApp::Rack::Application
run RubyApp::Rack::Route.new
end

... where RubyApp is my middleware/application.

During development the server is started via ...

Rack::Server.start(:config => '(path to config.ru)')

It's the RubyApp::Rack::Application class that I've observed being
initialized on every request. I haven't checked but I suspect the
RubyApp::Rack::Route class is as well.

Thanks for your help.

Frank

[Frank Ficnar]

I was doing some hunting and found that if I removed the map blocks
and replaced the last '/' block with the 'use' and 'run' statements
only, initialization of the RubyApp::Rack::Application class DID NOT
happen per-request. It happened once at startup (as expected) only.
If I put the map blocks back in then initialization of the
RubyApp::Rack::Application class DID happen per-request and DID NOT
happen at startup.

Am I doing something wrong with the map blocks?