Running Jobs in Production

There are two modes possible in the code base driven by an environment variable (and what processes your setup/run) called JOBS_SAME_PROCESS. If that variable is set then dispatched jobs like processing uploaded contacts, and sending text messages out are run on the same process as the actual web application.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each model:

JOBS_SAME_PROCESS

Simpler dispatch, application runs in a single 'node' process loop
Can be run on 'serverless' platforms like AWS Lambda (with one lambda)
When in development mode the log loop of the job processor processes doesn't

Separate Processes

If you are using a texting backend that rate-limits API calls (Twilio does not) then it's easier to make sure the rate-limit is observed with the separate process
On a big server-deployment job segfaults (should be impossible, but...) will more isolated