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How to Run Background Jobs on Heroku for Free

Delayed::Job and Resque are excellent ruby gems, but they require substantial funds and/or time to setup on Heroku or Slicehost. High cost/effort prevents bootstrapped startups from building apps that need background processing, like aggregators. So I’ve hacked together a template Sinatra app that uses GAE to give you free Cron and Task-Queue functionality on Heroku.

Comments

Cute, but he’s entirely wrong on the pricing of workers/cron on heroku.

“Background jobs on Heroku are handled with Delayed::Job. They call them workers. Each worker costs $36/month, and runs via cron every hour.”

Heroku workers run ALL THE TIME and you are being billed per hour, prorated to the second. It’s like having another dyno. Workers doesn’t fire via cron once an hour – they’re running all the time.

Heroku hourly cron costs $3/mo. A rake task (rake cron) will fire every hour.

So, cute… but if all you need is hourly cron, essentially pointless.

Seems ridiculous to try to work around such fantastic community members and a great service like Heroku. Pay the few dollars for the reasonably priced service they provide, yeah?

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