

AppHarbor launches background workers - friism
http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/03/08/background-workers-in-beta

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dazbradbury
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.

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friism
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.

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dazbradbury
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...

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friism
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.

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dazbradbury
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!

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barrydahlberg
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.

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runesoerensen
AppHarbor has a free plan, which allows you to run one web- or background
worker for free - should be ideal for prototyping.

~~~
barrydahlberg
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.

