Question

I have a table in my database with a list of emails to be sent, each at a specific time (precision down to the minute).

I’m on heroku, and I don’t want to spend anything right now.. Is there a way to do this? The only way I thought was to create a deamon/cron somewhere else and make it call a private url every minute.. any other idea? Any way to have some background process or something that can handle this (on Heroku and without paying extra for addons..)?

thanks!

Answer 1

Heroku’s free cron addon runs only once a day, so it is not suitable. Their paid cron addon runs only once an hour, so it is also not suitable. Running a daemon/cron elsewhere is a hack that will become problematic very quickly. It’s fundamentally bad architecture.

Using delayed_job with a single Heroku Worker makes sense. Plus, delayed_job lets you specify exactly when each job should be run, down to a 5-second granularity. Yes, it is $36/mo to do this. But it frees you from doing things the wrong way. Plus, if you expect that you will not need the Worker most of the time, you can look into auto-scaling delayed_job on Heroku so the Worker is only turned on when you need it.