find_each

Looping through a collection of records from the database (using the all method, for example) is very inefficient since it will try to instantiate all the objects at once.

In that case, batch processing methods allow you to work with the records in batches, thereby greatly reducing memory consumption.

The #find_each method uses #find_in_batches with a batch size of 1000 (or as specified by the :batch_size option).

Person.find_each do |person|
  person.do_awesome_stuff
end

Person.where("age > 21").find_each do |person|
  person.party_all_night!
end

If you do not provide a block to #find_each, it will return an Enumerator for chaining with other methods:

Person.find_each.with_index do |person, index|
  person.award_trophy(index + 1)
end

Options

• :batch_size - Specifies the size of the batch. Default to 1000.

• :start - Specifies the starting point for the batch processing.

This is especially useful if you want multiple workers dealing with the same processing queue. You can make worker 1 handle all the records between id 0 and 10,000 and worker 2 handle from 10,000 and beyond (by setting the :start option on that worker).

# Let's process for a batch of 2000 records, skipping the first 2000 rows
Person.find_each(start: 2000, batch_size: 2000) do |person|
  person.party_all_night!
end

NOTE: It’s not possible to set the order. That is automatically set to ascending on the primary key (“id ASC”) to make the batch ordering work. This also means that this method only works with integer-based primary keys.

NOTE: You can’t set the limit either, that’s used to control the batch sizes.