[erlang-questions] fire off a task via erlang

[Michael]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 09:29:31AM -0600, Wes James wrote:
> Yesterday some colleagues were talking about "how they would keep
> track of possibly millions of tasks that would need to be fired off on
> a given interval that users could select."  I.e, they were discussing
> how this could be made possible. For instance a user would log in to a
> web interface and they would set a task that could be an email or text
> message that would fire off once or every hour or every day at 1pm,
> etc.  Kind of like cron or even something like google calendar
> (sending event notifictions).  I was telling them that erlang could
> probably handle something like this.  I was thinking about the timer
> module.  The timer module would work for this wouldn't it?  I'm not
> sure how it would scale though.  Each user could manage their own
> timers, it would seem. Anyone have thoughts on this?
> 
> thx,
> 
> -wes
> 
________________________________________________________________

 maybe ...

http://forum.trapexit.org/viewtopic.php?t=15015&sid=8e3c52cb4f7f50d9dcc7c4b52a77aa68

 which I have used for very low volume notifications (i.e. one every N minutes)


I currently use a simple scan-every-5-minutes gen_server on a couchdb
database.  It will not scale well as-is (looks through entire table every
time).

   http://www.xquad.com/en/remindmef  
 (or httpS://... if you don't mind self-signed certs)


~M