I'm having a hard time figguring out what is wrong with my controller.
I create an attribure, @processes in the method index. I then want to
access the attribute in the same class, in another method
process_status. I get an error:

NoMethodError in Processes#process_status
You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occured while evaluating nil.sizeRAILS_ROOT:
../script/../config/..

So it looks to me that the instance of ProcessController is changing
and the attribute is nil? Is there a way around this? Why does Rails
create a new controller for each invocation of a method?