Question

I am a Rails novice programmer.

I am developing a social network.The system will send a message to users, if the post have not been read for a hour.

I have read Resque and Rake, but I do not know that which ways are appropriated to my situation.

I found that delayed_job can do an asynchronous method.
5.minutes.from_now will be evaluated when in_the_future is called

handle_asynchronously :in_the_future, :run_at => Proc.new { 5.minutes.from_now }

https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job

Answer 1

Well, you could either have a cron job run a rake task every hour over records meeting given criteria, or you could have each one create a background job entry (like delayedjob) that specifically runs for that user at now + 1 hour.