From what you've described, it's not really a thousand tasks, it's one task: close out auctions. What the PHP programmers suggest is a horrible idea. For two re

From what you've described, it's not really a thousand tasks, it's one task: close out auctions. What the PHP programmers suggest is a horrible idea. For two reasons, first, the reason you describe: nobody loading the page, and second because it may close out auctions way more often than necessary. Imagine if you get 1,000 people a second calling the close out auctions task. So if it really is just one close out auctions task, why not build a cron job to find all the closed auctions and do what you gotta do in a loop?