Background task processing

There comes a time in the development of most applications where the developers or users start to notice the application is feeling a bit slow. Some operations seem to take a long time and it is harming the usability of the rest of the application. It could be computationally expensive, or it could be because of a network operation reaching out to another system.

Let's imagine that you are in this scenario. You have built a great application and an endpoint that allows users to generate a Portable Document Format (PDF) report with the click of a button, showing all kinds of fancy data and graphs. The problem is that to retrieve all the data and then crunch the numbers seems to take 20 seconds. That's an eternity for an HTTP request! After spending time squeezing as much performance out of the report generator as you can, you are finally at the conclusion that it runs as fast as it can. What can you do?

Push it to the background.

When...