Handling Background Tasks

The second-most requested feature on the AppHarbor feedback forum (only beaten by a single vote by Mercurial support) is the ability for apps to run background tasks. We're thinking hard about how to get you that feature and would love to get more comments and suggestions.

In the meantime, a usable workaround, is to handle long-running tasks on a separate instance. AppHarbor runs on top of Amazon Web Services which lets you run "micro" instances with Windows for just $0.03 an hour (that's $22 per month). The micro instances are not very fast (especially not when bogged with memory-hungry Windows), but they are adequate for handling low-intensity background tasks. Michael, one of the AppHarbor co-founders, uses just such an instance to scrape data about Danish Politicians for Folkets Ting.

If you want run background tasks like this and would like to minimize latency, you should boot your EC2 instance in the US East Amazon location since this is where we run most of our servers. Using your own machine, you won't get the same smooth Git-enabled deploy experience as when deploying web sites to AppHarbor. Rest assured that we are working hard on solving that problem for you.