Some jobs don’t need persistence, or might have everything about them stored in a Postgres DB. Examples: I have a project where I render lots of little PDFs as previews for a LaTeX editor. My use case means it’s good to keep them around for a short while; after an hour or so I want to delete them all so they don’t fill up my disk. Perfect case for this. The question mentions rebuilding a site map—that sounds like it doesn’t need to persist much state. Finally, at my work we have orders that sit in a Postgres DB that we regularly check to see if any are stuck. We do use the Quantum library for that, but a solution like this could theoretically work.

> Rampant memory leak issues

As long as you’re not sending this genserver bogus messages, I don’t see how memory would leak in this example. Erlang applications are known to run uninterrupted for years at a time, so I figure this is a solvable problem.

When you do need persistence for more robust job scheduling, yes, having a real queue system in place is much better. You are correct there. I think the answer is good because it is so small and fits these simple use cases—the fact that you can handle those cases without needing something heavier is pretty awesome.