A lock that does not timeout can lead to a standstill and manual cleanup. Simple solution: redis ‘set ex nx’ and memcached ‘add’.

When indefinite locks happen, getting information on why they happen helps to debug the locking mechanism and see if the processes always fail to unlock.

A softer locking approach to receive feedback when locks expire:

Code

def lock
  timeout = 30
  key = 'lock'
  now = Time.now.to_i
  if redis.setnx(key, "#{now}-#{Process.pid}-#{Socket.gethostname}")
    yield
  elsif (old = redis.get(key)) && now > old.to_i + timeout
    logger.error("Releasing expired lock #{old}")
    redis.delete(key) # next process can get the lock 
  end
end

Not 100% safe since the delete could cause multiple processes to get a lock, but depending on your usecase this might be an ok tradeoff.