Background tasks that need to start right away

Rails
1

I’m looking for recommendations for a simple, stable way to accomplish
this.

Here’s the scenario:

  • whenever a user visits my app, I need to fire off a method that
    launches some API calls.
  • the user sees a ‘loading’ screen until the method returns some 15-20
    seconds later.

I’ve installed BackgrounDRB and am running it with thread pooling. This
works, but the job server crashes after a little while (I don’t know how
many concurrent threads each worker is supposed to handle…)

I’m looking for a solution that’s as simple, lightweight and stable as
possible for what I need to do. Ideally it wouldn’t involve monitoring a
separate process.

Right now I’m debating between:

  • trying to fix BackgrounDRb
  • installing Backgroundjob, which is self-spawning and hopefully more
    reliable
  • using spawn, either with forking or threading

What kind of setup would you run?

2

Robert M. wrote:

Right now I’m debating between:

  • trying to fix BackgrounDRb
  • installing Backgroundjob, which is self-spawning and hopefully more
    reliable
  • using spawn, either with forking or threading

Well, it appears none of my alternatives would even work…

  • Spawn with forking doesn’t seem to work under Passenger
  • Spawn with threading doesn’t either (apparently need another Apache or
    something?)
  • Backgroundjob doesn’t seem to have any provisions for running
    concurrent tasks…

Any ideas? :frowning:

3

On Oct 14, 2:07 pm, swachian [email protected] wrote:

I have such a problem as well. Spawn forks well in mongrel, but fails
in passenger.
However, it can be run spawn in thread mode if you have set the
config.active_record.allow_concurrency=true .

Something “stupid” like system(“…”) might work (because that’s both
forking and execing)

Fred

4

I have such a problem as well. Spawn forks well in mongrel, but fails
in passenger.
However, it can be run spawn in thread mode if you have set the
config.active_record.allow_concurrency=true .

On Sep 16, 2:51 am, Robert M. [email protected]

5

the active_record connection seems to be broken if only use normal
fork

On Oct 14, 10:08 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]