[Zope-dev] howto: background processes, queued events and ZEO?

[Jay, Dylan]

I have a very computationally expensive task that I need to perform for
users of my system. The idea is that when they access the page that needs
the results of this process they will be returned a note saying to wait
while the calculations are done. The calculation request is queued and
eventually picked up by a background process and run. Only one calculation
is run at once.

My current attempt at implementation is using Xron DTML Methods. However
from looking at the code I gather that this will not scale well if I decide
to use ZEO (I think every client will have a background dispatcher so the
task would be run multiple times). Using ZEO I'd like to nominate one or
more servers to be the workhorses and do all the calculations. Anyone tried
doing something like this or can suggest the best approach?