Amazon Simple Workflow might help: http://aws.amazon.com/swf/ http://aws.amazon.com/swf/ Personally, I use queue_classic + postgres triggers to keep track of e

Amazon Simple Workflow might help: http://aws.amazon.com/swf/ http://aws.amazon.com/swf/ Personally, I use queue_classic + postgres triggers to keep track of each of the job history. So I have a history of all the jobs, when they started, when they finished, the data in each job, etc. But yes, it's a pain. http://torquebox.org/ http://torquebox.org/ is supposed to help with the pain of managing background jobs (and lots of other things) for Rails applications.