If you don’t want to lost your time (about 2 hours for me), don’t understand why your change in your model are not taking in account, and then understand there with a thread that’s cannot be killed then block you model, create the ferret index at startup

In your environment.rb:

require 'ferret'
include Ferret
FERRET_INDEX = Index::Index.new(:path => FERRET_INDEX_DIR)

With FERRET_INDEX_DIR is the path to your index directory and then you can use FERRET_INDEX whereever you want in your application. Later I will deal with how to initialize my index :p

Links for ferret

• start here: trac
• tutorial
• acts_as_ferret