Jeff has previously blogged about using the cache to perform "out of band" processing on his websites, however I was wondering what other techniques people are using to process these sorts of tasks?
Years ago, I saw Rob Howard describe a way to use an HttpModule to process tasks in the background. It doesn't seem as slick as using the Cache, but it might be better for certain circumstances.
This blog post has the details, and there are many others that capture the same information if you look around.