I've quite often opened a REPL on Rails apps in the production environment. You can basically execute everything on the production environment. This is quite useful for checking what's going on (usually a mismatch between your development/staging environment and the production one).

Beware that you do not connect to the serving process that your customer is seeing. You just spin a new REPL process with the production settings. And frankly it was usually more than enough to find what you need to fix.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Sebastian Sastre <sebastian@flowingconcept.com> wrote:

On Apr 25, 2014, at 5:48 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

look into a running server' to find or investigate a problem makes all the difference

yeah, I agree. Logs are the last resource and hot debugs are unbeatable. They can cut costs a lot when investigating in the real environment where the problem happens and Smalltalk��s debugger is the closest thing to a developer-with-problem dream-tool that the industry can give.