Code Cleanup for Rails Site

The information we received below was given by our prev coder as to what needs to be done to clean up the code on our rails website This was in response to a few things not working on our website. For example the member ads auto-repost feature We want a completely clean functioning website as per the instructions below As per the instructions we want to upgrade the rails version we are using through this process. See detailed requirments for more info on what changes were advised to be made before bidding. Website is **[login to view URL]** It's just such a mess with configuration files etc for running the web server process, I couldn't track down the actual one that was being used everytime I restarted the server. Using Linux's top method, I could ascertain that the process was restarting, but no changes were being propogated ## Deliverables The information we received below was given by our prev coder as to what needs to be done to clean up the code on our rails website This was in response to a few things not working on our website. For example the member ads auto-repost feature We want a completely clean functioning website as per the instructions below As per the instructions we want to upgrade the rails version we are using through this process. See detailed req for more info Website is **[login to view URL]** 1) There's nothing wrong as far as the hosting company is concerned. It's just such a mess with configuration files etc for running the web server process, that I couldn't track down the actual one that was being used everytime I restarted the server. Using Linux's top method, I could ascertain that the process was physically restarting, but no changes were being propogated so it wasn''t using the config files I could find. 2) There are a few steps I'd take to clean it up. Then I'd start using a version management software (I recommend git). No need to keep copying folders of your apps for new versions. Git handles all of that cleanly. You can get a free account with assembla to have a centralised git repo on the cloud. Rebuild your rails app. This may not necessarily mean getting rid of all your code, but I'd be creating a new Rails 3 app, pasting all your code in and running it on a local development server. Any errors I get I would fix until I could get it running at all locally. This means you can now have a development environment locally (which makes working on the code much much easier, faster and less complicated) and you are also using a current version of Rails (negating security exploits and other various problems and incompatibilities of earlier versions). A lot of the code I was looking through was bad practice as far as rails goes. Rails promotes MVC development which separates view (template), controller (business logic) and model (database record) processing from each other. Your member ad repost method for a start is located within the memberAd model but contains significantly large amounts of business logic. This is bad MVC practice. Rails also loads itself up entirely for rake tasks (the whole app gets loaded into memory when you call a rake task. Necessary for rake to have access to everything). This is about 100mb depending on app size. You are currently using a rake ads:update task to repost ads. This is not ideal for a cronjob, because each time the task runs, it loads up 100mb or so of ram before running. Definitely not scalable at all. Better to use something like BackgroundRb or BackgroundJob (bj) rubygems. They only load up once, stay running in the background and are accepted ways to run rails cron style tasks.