Question

I’m working a a project for a new web app. I’m identifying the key points of functionality, and one thing that I clearly don’t know how to approach is as follows:

Once per minute the server needs to run a series of calcs on its data, and post new derived summaries.

So in essence what I need is a way to run a server side script once per minute, reliably, even when users aren’t active.

I’m using ASP.NET 3.5, C# for the web interface. Using SQL 2005 for the data back end.

I suppose all the data thats being changed is SQL side, so the script could function completely there if thats more workable.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

There are two options for ‘background’ processing on a web site. You could not do it as part of the site, but rather do it in a windows service (can use the same business objects an everything) or you can do it in a background thread started in the web app. We’ve used both with success, different ones in different places. In our Application_Start we do:

//Submit background thread to update time left hospital System.Threading.Thread checkoutThread =    new System.Threading.Thread(BackgroundThread.CheckoutUpdate); checkoutThread.IsBackground = true; checkoutThread.Priority = System.Threading.ThreadPriority.BelowNormal; checkoutThread.Start(); 

Where BackgroundThread.CheckoutUpdate is defined as public static void CheckoutUpdate()