How to run automatic "jobs" in asp.net?

Question

I want to have my website do a number of calculations every 10 minutes and then update a database with the results. How exactly do I set such a timer, i am assuming it would be in global.asax?

Answer 1

Doing something like that in a web application is somewhere between difficult and unstable to impossible. Web applications are simply not meant to be run non-stop, only to reply to requests.

Do you really need to do the calculations every ten minutes? I have found that in most cases when someone asks a question like this, they really just need the appearence of something running at an interval, but as long as noone is visiting the page to see the results, the results doesn't really need to be calculated.

If this is true in your case also, then you just need to keep track of when the calculations were done the last time, and for every request check if enough time has gone by to recalculate.