Scheduling

Running certain tasks in a scheduled manner may be an easy solution for many problems. One might be refreshing the application cache when the data needs to be fresh and warm no matter what the actual traffic is. Other could be the synchronization or periodical clean-up. There are obviously few good architectural patterns to do it in more elegant and efficient way - distributed queues, publish-subscribe models, enterprise service buses etc. But the simplicity of scheduling still might be an important decision variable.