Is Rails's “delayed_job” for cron task really?

Question

delayed_job is at http://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job

Can delayed_job have the ability to do cron task? Such as running a script every night at 1am. Or run a

Answer 1

You can also use the ClockWork gem: https://github.com/adamwiggins/clockwork-rails-dj

Clockwork runs as a separate daemon and can be used to trigger jobs of any sort that either getting added to a job queueing system or run right away.

Use Delayed_Job for what it's good for, a job queueing system which can be distributed over multiple nodes (or not). Use something else to add jobs to the queue at the right time.

I was using rake(or runner)/cron/whenever gem to schedule background tasks but was finding my server load was just so high because I would be getting hit constantly with rake/runner loading up the rails environment. Delayed_Job workers are your rails daemons that stay running so you aren't constantly firing up Rails every time a background task is required.