Web apps are increasingly focused on background jobs. In fact, the term “background job” almost seems inaccurate - the heavy lifting done by worker processes is often the meat of the app’s purpose. The web portion of the app, by comparison, does only the relatively lightweight work of putting job requests into queues, and later presenting the results of jobs as HTML or JSON.

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So: you’re now hip to doing your heavy lifting in the background, via a queueing system like Delayed Job. If not, read The Rails Way's guide to Delayed Job, watch the Railscast about Delayed Job, or read my post on building a queue-backed feed reader.

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