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

Check out BackgrounDRb, it is designed for exactly the scenario you are describing.

I think it has been around for a while and is pretty mature. You can monitor the status of the workers.

It's a pretty good idea to develop on the same development platform as your production environment, especially when working with Rails. The suggestion to run Linux in a VM is a good one. Check out Sun xVM for Open Source virtualization software.