Background Processes On Windows (Saturday, September 11th, 2010) |
Sometimes Windows makes me want to kill myself. It was a simple enough idea: I've got a task to be performed, which can take anywhere from several seconds to a minute or two. I want to activate it from a web page, and display a progress bar to the user. To make this work on the web, of course, this means the initial request has to spawn a background process and terminate, then I'll use AJAX to make subsequent calls to another script that checks on the progress, and update the progress bar every couple of seconds. It's a little more complex than you might expect, if you're not familiar with web development. But on UNIX-based systems, it's really not that complicated. Unfortunately, I needed to do this on a Windows server. It turns out that Windows doesn't have anything equivalent
to Eventually I downloaded the PsTools
package from SysInternals, and was able to use There was just one other minor hurdle: even though I set
In the end, I got it working, and the resulting progress bar works perfectly. It was quite an adventure in frustration and annoyance, but now I know what to expect if I ever need to do something like this again. |
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“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a
mistake when you make it again.”
- F. P. Jones |