Google App Engine - Task Queues vs Cron Jobs

Question

The latest Google App Engine release supports a new Task Queue API in Python. I was comparing the capabilities of this API vs the already existing Cron service. For backgr

Answer 1

The way I look at it is that if I am just parsing one RSS feed a Cron job might be good enough. If I have to parse X number of RSS feeds specified at run time by a user or any other system variable then I would choose tasks every time.

I only say this because in the past I have had to excecute many user defined twitter searches at regular intervals and with Cron jobs I ended making a very bad Queuing system to execute the requests that needed to be ran - it didn't scale, it didn't help that and the smallest interval that a cron job can be is only 1 minute (I had more searches to perform than minutes in the day).

The cool thing about tasks is that you can give them an ETA, so you can say I would like this to be executed 47 seconds in the future, or I would like this to be executed at 12:30.