AppHarbor launches background workers | Hacker News Reader

AppHarbor launches background workers

blog.appharbor.com

29 pointsfriism8 comments

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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