Cinderella Background Job Runner

Cinderella is a specialized open-source software tool designed as an asynchronous background and scheduled job running daemon. It was developed to support primary applications, particularly PHP web applications, which traditionally struggle with long-running background processes due to their request-response lifecycle. By acting as a local service, Cinderella allows applications to offload tasks via HTTP, ensuring that main processes remain unblocked while the software handles complex scheduling and queuing in the background.

The project was created and is maintained by Coldfront Labs, a digital agency based in Canada. The brand name 'Cinderella' serves as a metaphor for the software's role: staying in the 'kitchen' of the server to perform laborious background tasks—like picking lentils from the fireplace—while the main application is free to attend 'the ball' by serving user requests. It is built using PHP and the Amp asynchronous process manager, emphasizing high performance and low-latency task execution.