Do I need to close my connections to Amazon S3 in my Rails App?

Question

I'm migrating my rails app to Heroku and need to change my file upload functionality to use Amazon S3 instead of local storage. I am using the aws-s3 gem and have this working but just want to make sure that I'm doing things right and not creating problems for myself.

In my uploading code I have the following;

AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(
    :access_key_id     => 'Not telling',
    :secret_access_key => 'Really not telling'
  )
AWS::S3::S3Object.store("#{self.name}", upload_file_field.read, 'my_bucket')

This works perfectly but I'm concerned that I'm leaving some sort of connection to the server open. Do I need to close the connection once I'm done (e.g. with AWS::S3::Base.disconnect) or can I just leave this as it is?

Clearly I don't have a good understanding of the protocols being used behind the scenes with my connection to S3 but I don't particularly want to - I just want to make sure that this will work without causing problems.

Answer 1

Check here for the docs for the API, and the disconnect method in particular:

http://amazon.rubyforge.org/doc/classes/AWS/S3/Connection/Management/ClassMethods.html#M000088

It's not clear about whether you must close each connection explicitly. However, it does mention a performance increase if you open a persistent connection, this is done by default anyway.

[...]

* :persistent - Whether to use a persistent connection to the server.

Having this on provides around a two fold

performance increase but for long running processes some firewalls may find the long lived connection suspicious and close the connection. If you run into connection errors, try setting :persistent to false. Defaults to true.