Celery is over-engineered but it does get the job done for most of the types of background tasks that I want a webserver to be involved with. Sending emails, m

Celery is over-engineered but it does get the job done for most of the types of background tasks that I want a webserver to be involved with. Sending emails, making thumbnails, building 8MB xml files and uploading them to other servers, validating objects, sending messages to people, geocoding addresses with google etc. These types of things I do not want happening on the webserver at all. Its on a separate machine. I certainly don't want to block the user from getting a web response even while waiting for the email to connect and send. But Django and python could really use lightweight synchronous support for small things. > (Not sure how it helps the user not wait if it's synchronous.) example: Checking several URLs in parallel, collecting all the responses then returning some summary to the user. User is waiting, but at least the python doesn't have to do these sequentially so the wait is less.