BackgroundTask vs task queue (Celery, RQ, etc)

[oTree-org]

Hi, what is the general guidance on what type of tasks are appropriate for BackgroundTask? Is it just for quick things like sending an email? Or could it be used for tasks that take 1 minute - 1 hour? (either IO-bound like downloading files, or CPU/GPU compute-bound).

In my case my tasks are synchronous (not async).

[adriangb]

I would suggest considerably less than 30s which is the default SIGTERM timeout on Kuberneted (just general number). 1s to send an email should be fine, but I wouldn’t do 30s of compute intensive stuff.

[oTree-org]

Thanks!