Correctly Modeling Stateful Objects in @effect/platform

What is the idiomatic way to handle state objects on a web server? The application I'm porting over has one large stateful object that gets read from a file on startup and saved (sans the non-serializables) on teardown. I'm trying to use Ref for it but it seems... unwieldy? Maybe I'm off-base on that feeling but I wanted to field the question here, just in case.