Why not use shared ActiveRecord connections for Rspec + Selenium?

Question

It seems the most commonly accepted way to deal with Selenium and tests is to avoid using transactional fixtures and then using something like database_cleaner between tests

Answer 1

There's a good thing at the end of this post. It may explain why I get a MALLOC error when I attempt to a very simple threading script.

http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Base/connection

leente - March 15, 2011 0 thanks
Don't cache it!

Don’t store a connection in a variable, because another thread might try to use it when it’s already checked back in into the connection pool. See: ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::ConnectionPool

connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

threads = (1..100).map do
  Thread.new do
    begin
      10.times do
        connection.execute("SELECT SLEEP(1)")  # WRONG
        ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT SLEEP(1)")  # CORRECT
      end
      puts "success"
    rescue => e
      puts e.message
    end
  end
end

threads.each(&:join)