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

I'm using Windows Vista 64 bit for my development machine; however, my production machine is Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Should I consider switching to Linux for my development machine? Will the solutions presented work on both?

Have you considered running Linux in a VM on top of Vista?