Curious what solution Stack Exchange uses for running background tasks, considering they are running many databases and domains, and scale across many machines. Generally that makes windows services relics of the past, if you need to scale job processing over many boxes across many databases.

Can anyone at SE shed light on how they program these background tasks? Originally Jeff blogged about using cache invalidation events as mechanisms for scheduling jobs.

share|improve this question
add comment

migrated from Apr 12 '12 at 14:22

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

1 Answer

up vote 12 down vote accepted

We use a windows service that kicks off various HTTP endpoints that run the actual tasks. So the tasks themselves run on pre-defined web servers and are triggered by a windows service on another box.

share|improve this answer
Sooo... curl and cron jobs, only Windows style? I feel validated, somehow... –  Charles Apr 19 '12 at 17:47
yeah .. exactly –  waffles Apr 19 '12 at 17:56
thank you, I agree with charles, it's how I've been doing it. With a lot of strange looks from others. But we know how to redeploy websites quickly, and debug them. –  DevelopingChris Apr 20 '12 at 17:50
add comment

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .