If my web app needs to send email notifications that are not time sensitive (e.g. they can wait a few minutes), do you think it's better for my web app to put the message on a queue or in the db for another program (e.g. plain ruby) to load up and send the email? I know I can still send them asynchronously by putting them on a queue and then having a background process load up the rails context to send them, but I don't know much about this and am wondering if I do that, would it be that much more scalable to just have plain ruby or any other standalone simple custom mailer program written in Java or whatever doing the emailing?
If my web app needs to send email notifications that are not time sensitive (e.g. they can wait a few minutes), do you think it's better for my web app to put the message on a queue or in the db for another program (e.g. plain ruby) to load up and send the email? I know I can still send them asynchronously by putting them on a queue and then having a background process load up the rails context to send them, but I don't know much about this and am wondering if I do that, would it be that much more scalable to just have plain ruby or any other standalone simple custom mailer program written in Java or whatever doing the emailing?
You may want to look at ar_mailer
http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2006/08/15/ar_mailer
-philip
