Comment by Cliff Rowley on "What is the most efficient way to run triggered tasks on server?"

We use the whenever gem to schedule frequent events (it's a Ruby/Rails interface to cron). For infrequent, one-off events perhaps look at atd. Failing that, a message queue of some description.

Are you sure message queues are reliable enough? I was using sidekiq for queuing but was told by my senior that it might not be reliable or underlying redis server can crash.

Akshat, what you should keep in mind that Software development is all about trade offs. Even before you start thinking about a particular solution, you should always ask yourself what do you want to do or what do you expect from the system. If your priority is "High Availability" then you probably will have to compromise on simplicity and server cost, and if your priority is quick prototyping then you may have to worry about spikes and crashed servers. As Cliff mentions, this particular gem works well for a well designed Rails application, but probably won't work for a high QPS system, because of inherent problems or Ruby or underlying queues.

Exactly as Ujjwal says, it's "horses for courses" as they say. In our case we don't need HA, so whenever and/or atd work just fine for us. If our requirements dictated more, we'd need to look at something else.

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