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Some operations take minutes or even hours to complete, such as processing a video, generating a large report, or running a data export. These jobs cannot be handled like normal API requests, which are expected to return quickly.

This lesson covers how systems handle tasks that take too long to finish within a normal request, how to run them reliably in the background, and how to deal with failures, progress tracking, and very large jobs.

It also covers how to approach long-running tasks in a system design interview, since many common interview problems include work that takes minutes or even hours to complete.