Ruby on Rails Multiple HTTP request at the same time?

Question

I\'m pulling multiple requests (its pulling one at a time), I was wondering if there\'s a way pull requests all at the same time if I have something like this:

Answer 1

There are gems like spawn that do this in a forked process or as a new thread in your process.. Here is a link to another SO post that discusses it

What is the difference between forking and threading in a background process?

Here is the gem in question: https://github.com/tra/spawnling

Answer 2

Yes! For a proof-of-concept, try

require 'thread'

client = Instagram.client(:access_token => session[:access_token])
@user = client.user
@recent_media_items = client.user_recent_media

threads = []
threads << Thread.new { @lv = client.tag_recent_media('lv', options = {:count => 60}) }
threads << Thread.new { @lv1 = client.tag_recent_media('lv1', options = {:count => 60}) }
threads << Thread.new { @lv2 = client.tag_recent_media('lv2', options = {:count => 60}) }
threads << Thread.new { @lv3 = client.tag_recent_media('lv3', options = {:count => 60}) }
threads.each(&:join) # this waits for all the threads to finish before proceeding
puts [@lv, @lv1, @lv2, @lv3]

In practice, you will want to set up some error handling and retry settings within the threads. Also, you may run into issues with thread-safety in the Instagram gem. If you are doing this on a large scale with hundreds or thousands of requests, you may want to try a concurrent HTTP client like Typhoeus or an evented HTTP client like EM-HTTP-Request. For these, you would have to manually implement the tag_recent_media method that is in the Instagram gem.