# ADR-006: Background Job Processing and Task Queues

**Date**: 2025-12-12

**Status**: Proposed

## Context

The application's core purpose involves long-running, resource-intensive tasks like OCR processing of flyers. Executing these tasks within the lifecycle of an API request is unreliable and does not scale. A failure during processing could be lost without a robust system.

## Decision

We will implement a dedicated background job processing system using a task queue library like **BullMQ** (with Redis). All flyer ingestion, OCR processing, and other long-running tasks (e.g., sending bulk emails) MUST be dispatched as jobs to this queue.

## Consequences

**Positive**: Decouples the API from heavy processing, allows for retries on failure, and enables scaling the processing workers independently. Increases application reliability and resilience.
**Negative**: Introduces a new dependency (Redis) into the infrastructure. Requires refactoring of the flyer processing logic to work within a job queue structure.