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Ask HN: How do you prefer to run background jobs for a website/service?

5 points by billymeltdown ↗ HN
Just about any sizable web-available service generally needs to run background jobs. This almost always includes some interaction with inbound or outbound mail services which tend to be slow (even with my man Exim on the case). Kinda curious what solutions HN readers prefer for handling this. E.g. a lot of Rubyists use BackgrounDRb, but I prefer my little Looper.rb.

3 comments

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thwarted
cron. Should exist on every UNIX system, the most common syntax is standardized (you can even call it a DSL if you want), there are multiple implementations, it supports complex command lines, its jobs can be written in any language, it is well documented, and its limitations and security are well understood.
billymeltdown
I know all about cron, I was looking to see if people choose to just queue up all their jobs in a scheduler, if they fire up stand alone scripts, daemons, etc.
thwarted
If you want a job queue, then a scheduler won't help much. I've found that stand alone scripts are usually better because then you write them so they can be "restarted" and maintain state outside of their address space, so you reduce the amount of lost work if you have to kill it. Not necessarily the case with long running deamons.