Best practice for Rails App to run a long task in the background?

Question

I have a Rails application that unfortunately after a request to a controller, has to do some crunching that takes awhile. What are the best practices in Rails for providin

Answer 1

The Workling plugin allow you to schedule background tasks in a queue (they would perform the lengthy task). As of version 0.3 you can ask a worker for its status, this would allow you to display some nifty progress bars.

Another cool feature with Workling is that the asynchronous backend can be switched: you can used DelayedJobs, Spawn (classic fork), Starling...