Heroku. Django. Do I need "worker" processes

Question

I am new on Hoerku and web hosting in general. I have a small forum that uses Django and Heroku. For the moment, I have 2 dynos running the "web" process. I don't use Celery. All that the forum does is manage Http requests, query the database (Postgres), and display information. I am intrigued by this lines on Heroku's documentation: "A web app typically has at least web and worker process types".

Do I need "worker" processes? I could have one dyno for the web process (gunicorn) and one dyno for a worker process. I just don't know what worker processes are often used with django, please provide examples. How can I determine if I need to add those processes? Maybe I am not taking advantage of some useful features.

Answer 1

Worker processes are generally used to run background tasks (and yeah, you will be using Celery through a worker process - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/celery-heroku).

It is perfectly fine to have web apps without the worker processes. Many of simple-medium apps don't.