5 ms·

AppHarbor launches background workers

29 points by friism 15y ago

dazbradbury 15y ago
Awesome, nice to see the features keep rolling out. Can I ask, what happens if you have an executable you call for certain functions currently? My use case is calling an executable for PDF generation on-the-fly. Will my set-up continue to work, or do I need to be paying $49 per month extra for this? I'm not looking for a keep-alive background worker, just a one-off call to an executable as part of a web-request.
- friism 15y ago
  That scheme will continue to work, but for the sake of your users, you might want consider whether having them wait for the pdf-generation while their request is being served is optimal.
  - dazbradbury 15y ago
    Sure, although it's a one off generation and subsequent requests are served from amazon S3. It could be optimized further as you say, but I think this is OK for now. Also, have you considered emailing users with big announcements? I found out about the pricing announcement here on HN, but will be a shock for people who haven't seen the announcement come march...
    - friism 15y ago
      We sent out a newsletter for the same reason (including an announcement to people who had unsubscribed). Did you not get yours? We'll do another newsletter with background workers soon.
      - dazbradbury 15y ago
        Ah, I did, but only in a newsletter on the 28th Feb (with pricing originally planned to come in the beginning of March.) I guess with the pricing being pushed back a month, this is a moot point. Clearly you're on top of it! Loving the service so far though, so thanks!
barrydahlberg 15y ago
Nice to see such a simple and straightforward approach taken. I'm starting to feel better about AppHarbour now that things seem to be rolling out more regularly. Currently my only complaint is that we want to run many very small prototype sites and the pricing doesn't work out very well for that.
- runesoerensen 15y ago
  AppHarbor has a free plan, which allows you to run one web- or background worker for free - should be ideal for prototyping.
  - barrydahlberg 15y ago
    Yes it's good for testing but if you want a host name and a background task it gets uncheap pretty quickly. Time for some creative engineering perhaps.

29 points by friism 15y ago

Awesome, nice to see the features keep rolling out. Can I ask, what happens if you have an executable you call for certain functions currently? My use case is calling an executable for PDF generation on-the-fly. Will my set-up continue to work, or do I need to be paying $49 per month extra for this? I'm not looking for a keep-alive background worker, just a one-off call to an executable as part of a web-request.

friism 15y ago
That scheme will continue to work, but for the sake of your users, you might want consider whether having them wait for the pdf-generation while their request is being served is optimal.
- dazbradbury 15y ago
  Sure, although it's a one off generation and subsequent requests are served from amazon S3. It could be optimized further as you say, but I think this is OK for now. Also, have you considered emailing users with big announcements? I found out about the pricing announcement here on HN, but will be a shock for people who haven't seen the announcement come march...
  - friism 15y ago
    We sent out a newsletter for the same reason (including an announcement to people who had unsubscribed). Did you not get yours? We'll do another newsletter with background workers soon.
    - dazbradbury 15y ago
      Ah, I did, but only in a newsletter on the 28th Feb (with pricing originally planned to come in the beginning of March.) I guess with the pricing being pushed back a month, this is a moot point. Clearly you're on top of it! Loving the service so far though, so thanks!

barrydahlberg 15y ago

Nice to see such a simple and straightforward approach taken. I'm starting to feel better about AppHarbour now that things seem to be rolling out more regularly. Currently my only complaint is that we want to run many very small prototype sites and the pricing doesn't work out very well for that.

runesoerensen 15y ago
AppHarbor has a free plan, which allows you to run one web- or background worker for free - should be ideal for prototyping.
- barrydahlberg 15y ago
  Yes it's good for testing but if you want a host name and a background task it gets uncheap pretty quickly. Time for some creative engineering perhaps.