BackgrounDRb is a system for managing long running background tasks from your rails app. It allows you to separate your long running tasks from the raisl requests/response cycle. And since its a drb server, it provides you with an application wide context for storing data and caches of data regardless of how many fcgi or mongrel processes you run. It can even work across a cluster of machines to provid a centralized manager for background tasks and cached data.