Comments on: Long running tasks in Rails: Backgroundrb

By: Bill Harding

Bill Harding — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:26:58 +0000

Good article, a couple points of feedback.

You mention grabbing the job key so we can check back on the job, but you never mention how that might be done, which renders the point of mentioning the capturing of the job key rather meaningless.
While logging is always your friend, I would assert from my backgroundRb experience that the Ruby debugger is a much better friend than logfiles. It can work with backgroundRb so long as you don't start it as a process (leave out the "start" param when starting BDRb) and you include the ruby debugger files in your worker such that it knows what the "debugger" line means.

Those points notwithstanding, great work!

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:12:58 +0000

This looks exactly what I was looking for! Thanks a lot!

By: Jim Neath

Jim Neath — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:49:57 +0000

Hi Kyle,

I've just been playing around with backgroundrb today, I've just got a quick question.

I'm working on a site that needs to convert videos in the background (similiar to what you mentioned early in your article). Is the best option to start a new worker for each video or just have one worker that deals with all the videos?

Thanks for the article, really helped me get my head around the whole background process jazz.

By: izomorphius

izomorphius — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:42:47 +0000

Could you be a bit more specific on the scheduling part? You never mentioned where to create that yaml file or how to name it. Anyway backgroundrb really sounds great and this tutorial has really been of help - I am only trying to help you make it perfect ;-) .

By: no hit - no run » Blog Archive » 002

no hit - no run » Blog Archive » 002 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:54:46 +0000

[...] Long running tasks in Rails: Backgroundrb [...]

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:46:38 +0000

Yep, I think it’d work perfectly for that.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:49:19 +0000

I think this is exactly what I need. I have a ruby script that caches my flickr and delicious stuff to a file, then I marshall it in MANUALLY! I actually login to the shell and run the script periodically. I’ve tried cron for this, but no luck for whatever reason. I’ve also tried to call the script from my Rails application using %x[] and system, but no luck there, either.

Do you think backgroundrb is a good thing to use for my situation? I’d probably schedule the task at 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM — seem reasonable?