We're looking into them ourselves atm. There are heaps of tools for this sort of thing, each differing based on your actual requirements.<br>I went through rbates' railscasts to get an overview of some of the more popular ones.<br>
These are the ones that are reasonably recent and relevant:<br><ol><li>Using background rake - <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Frailscasts.com%2Fepisodes%2F127-rake-in-background&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzcaPlwLRj4TgbhukizHlUp2z2v5sg">http://railscasts.com/episodes/127-rake-in-background</a><br>
Only good for very-occasional 'do it now in the background' tasks<br><br></li><li>Starling + Workling - <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Frailscasts.com%2Fepisodes%2F128-starling-and-workling&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzfi2YbvXAI1mbIrE4SZOKf7K2ODhg">http://railscasts.com/episodes/128-starling-and-workling</a><br>
Looks
like these are great for continual-queue workers... but in the next
Railscast he recommends against them for scheduled-jobs.<br><br></li><li>Custom Daemon (with <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdougal%2Fdaemon_generator%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzewTp0bnlsjC_SqKzDj3fdu5CDI9w">daemon-generator plugin</a>) - <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Frailscasts.com%2Fepisodes%2F129-custom-daemon&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzdpS8P5p1K_wCgU6KvvE9ynEvK-TQ">http://railscasts.com/episodes/129-custom-daemon</a><br>
In this one he uses scheduled mailing lists as the example. eg "schedule this delivery right now and that one to be delivered next Tuesday".<br><br></li><li>God - <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Frailscasts.com%2Fepisodes%2F130-monitoring-with-god&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzeNDtt5QnN2lrF4o9D6IZNCkPtN7Q">http://railscasts.com/episodes/130-monitoring-with-god</a><br>
For monitoring your daemons once you've got a few...   <br><br></li><li>Delayed Job - <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Frailscasts.com%2Fepisodes%2F171-delayed-job&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzdku0ngZnYHGk0IiWwglesjsapGDg">http://railscasts.com/episodes/171-delayed-job</a> <br>
Automatically supports priority, scheduled-starts
and retry-on-failure. Ryan Bates suggests using the 'collectiveideas'
fork on Github as it's more feature-complete and contains useful
recipes (eg Capistrano).</li></ol>There's also spawn, BackgroundJob, BackgrounDRB, background_fu  and heaps of others.<br><br>We're looking at a combination of delayed_job + god (for monitoring.)<br>But it's interesting to have a look at the wide variety of options out there.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Taryn<br>