[Best practice] Heavy background tasks?

[eluser]kgill[/eluser]
Just some quick thoughts:

The usual solution to these kind of problems are cron jobs, if your host doesn't give you access to cron, get a new host. Once you've got cron working for you, you want to identify your non-peak times and do the heavy work then - we have several processes that are very CPU intensive so we set them to run each night at 4am when we have almost 0 users.

Other more expensive options are to work with a replicated database for your reporting, so server 1 is your production database and that gets replicated to server 2, you then can work with server 2 without affecting your production performance.