I have a problem (or used to have a problem...). In my working on web 2.0 startup, I bumped in a problem which in first thought looked to me as a simple one but after something like 5 seconds I figured out that it's actually a problem (or something to think about - I like this phrase much better ;)).

So after this introduction, lets introduce the 'something to think about' issue: I had to run each period of time a set of tasks in order to update some database statuses. If my web application was hosted on a dedicated server, this one had be solved very quickly; windows service - I guess you thought about it yourselves...

BUT, we are not going to host this web 2.0 application in a dedicated server (at least not now) and the scheduled task became a task itself, because (if you are web developers you'd better know) application is lives as long as there is at least one client that consumes it. When the last consumer is going home, also the application in going home to relax...

Now to the main question: how can we keep it alive?

After doing some thinking between me and myself, gathering up some good resolutions and not I thought about good one; in your web application create a web service that most of its job is to expose a KeepAlive web method that will return a dummy value and will keep the web application alive all the time and also will perform the tasks that you to establish for permanent period of time.

In your local PC, create a small desktop application in order to handle the tasks. This application will be a windows service that will run automatically under your machine every X interval and will ping the web service in order to keep the web application alive.

Note: the web service itself will know to execute the specific task itself every predefined period of time.

What about performance? This solution could affect your web application performance (I think that you know the reason why), in this case you can create another wen application that will be placed in the same server and all its job is to be kept alive and perform your tasks.

Any addition will be appreciated... I am going to write this web service now...