Lord have mercy on my soul. I wasted 2 hours inspecting file permissions, API documentation, and looking through log files trying to find out what was wrong with my file caching. Turns out my crontab was running the caching task at the 3rd minute of each hour instead of every 3 minutes. Sigh.

Found a pretty cool utility though: cronguru

RIGHT

*/3 * * * * cd /home/app && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake cache:write && chown -R app:app tmp

WRONG

3 * * * * cd /home/app && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake cache:write && chown -R app:app tmp