I’m currently looking at the possibility to move from Parse to Backendless. The only concern I still have after exploring your solution is regarding background jobs, or timers as you call them.
On Parse you could have background jobs running for up to 15 minutes but your solution offers only 5 seconds for free right?
Is there another way for me to execute long running scripts on your solution?
I have scripts that updates the database for as long as 5 minutes when running, are these possible to have on your solution?
I understand this is not enough time for your code. Is there particular reason it takes up to 5 minutes? Is it the size of the database? Please describe your use-case in greater details, we’d love to help if we can.
As an alternative, you could run the import script on a low-cost (or free) machine (for instance a micro-instance in AWS) which would perform the background job logic.
I suppose this is some kind of parser you have, and you save the parsed data into database.
In this case, you may just split your job to parse only one record and save it.
For example, if it’s the several news websites you parse, then you may have a dedicated timer for each one of them and parse a single news entry each 60 seconds (or each second, if you buy an extension pack).
Hope it helps!
Yeah exactly. The main reason why it takes up to 5 minutes of running time is that we update a lot of records in the database every time. We fetch information from multiple sources through API:s and when we then manipulate this data and save it in our own database it takes this amount of time.
So we are now currently on the hunt for a solution that can offer this to a minimal fee or even free. We’re currently early in the startup of this project and do not afford to pay a lot of money for it right now, that’s why Parse were so great (until they now released that they’ll close next year) and your solution seemed like a very close alternative to Parse.
We’ll have to continue investigate!
Thanks again for the quick response!
Why don’t you spin up a DigitalOcean 5$ LAMP/NGINX/xxx stack, do your long running task there and “just save the result” to backendless?
(You’ll get 31days of “service execution time” at the price of 20 seconds in the marketplace.)
Take my referral link:
It gives you 10$ of balance which is equal 2 months of a server.
I did so myself to host static content like images as it get’s me many more req./second when the backendless stack primarily serves the API.
BaaS is designed to serve a secure API, not for long running operations.
Another opportunity could be to run the parsing via google cloud code and pay only the amount of time your script took to execute. However, i don’t think you’ll get any far with 5$ there.
