Background Workers or Long Running Processes

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drush

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Apr 15, 2010, 5:18:51 PM4/15/10
to WebROaR - Ruby Application Server
One of the gaps in current deployment models (IMO) is support for long
running background processes in a single app.

For example, you see many rails applications using backgroundrb or
skynet or some custom scheduler to handle such tasks. In most cases,
background rb still needs daemonization, monitoring and unified
logging support.

It seems to me that given the integrated queue, Webroar might already
have, or be able to easily support long running tasks, leveraging the
current process management framework. Is support for such code
already there? If not, I'd be curious to hear from the core team on
if they think this might in fact be plausible.

I think this feature might significantly differentiate Webroar from
the other frameworks if it was supported.

If a simple example might help, here is a long-running background
process that I might like to deploy with my web application (scaling
horizontally as my web tier grows):

--
# pseudo code
background.rb:

scheduler.every.5.minutes do
Feed.lock_if_needs_update('thishostname', :limit => 10)
Feed.find_by_lockedby('thishostname').each do |f|
f.update
f.save_and_unlock
end
end
--

Thanks,
Darren

Dharmarth Shah

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Apr 21, 2010, 8:58:08 AM4/21/10
to WebROaR - Ruby Application Server
Darren,

Thanks a lot for sending in your thoughts. It's always good to see
such ideas/feedback that ultimately help the product become better.

WebROaR does have an integrated message queue and should be able to
support background jobs, however, building such a feature is not
currently a part of our roadmap. At this point, we would probably keep
these features on hold for WebROaR, until we see a good number of
users asking for it.

Thanks,
Dharmarth
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