---
id: "background-tasks"
date: "2026-04-05"
title: "Start it and forget it — background tasks that survive everything"
summary: "Site crawls, vault indexing, and knowledge graph builds now run in the background — close panels, switch tabs, even restart Chrome, and your work picks up where it left off."
image: "/medias/background.task.jpg"
header: "Feature"
tags: [reliability, ux, infrastructure]
---

Site crawls, vault indexing, and knowledge graph builds can take minutes. Until now, closing the panel or navigating away meant losing all that progress silently. No warning, no recovery — just gone.

That changes today. Every long-running operation in Daneel now runs independently of the UI. Start a crawl, close the panel, browse other sites, come back later — your task is still running, and your progress bar picks up exactly where you left off.

## What changed

Previously, operations like site crawling lived inside the UI component that triggered them. When the component unmounted (panel close, tab switch, navigation), the operation died with it. This was a fundamental architectural flaw: long-running work cannot live inside short-lived UI.

We inverted the relationship. The background service worker now owns every task. The UI is just an observer — it subscribes to progress updates, but its presence or absence has no effect on execution.

## Checkpoint and resume

Chrome's service workers sleep after 30 seconds of inactivity and can be terminated at any time. Daneel handles this with checkpoint-forward execution: after each meaningful step (a page crawled, a document embedded, a batch of entities extracted), the task state is written to durable storage.

A heartbeat alarm fires every 60 seconds. If the service worker was evicted, it wakes up, reads the checkpoint, and re-dispatches the work from where it stopped. For site crawls, already-fetched pages are skipped. For knowledge graphs, incremental mode detects processed chunks and picks up from there.

This means tasks survive not just panel closes, but also service worker eviction, Chrome restarts, and even machine reboots.

## The Tasks panel

A new **Settings > Tasks** panel gives you full visibility into what's happening in the background. Every running, queued, completed, and failed task appears here with:

- A live progress bar with percentage, elapsed duration, and estimated time remaining
- Transport-style controls: pause, resume, stop, and delete
- GPU-aware queuing — if you start a second task while one is running, it waits in line automatically (two simultaneous GPU workloads cause crashes, so Daneel prevents that)
- A history section with per-task and bulk delete

You can also cancel an in-progress crawl directly from the Search overlay using the new Cancel button.

## What this means for you

You no longer need to babysit long operations. Start a 150-page site crawl, switch to your vault, build a knowledge graph there, and come back to find both completed — one after the other, queued automatically. The extension works while you work.

This infrastructure is also the foundation for future features like deep research, scheduled re-indexing, and parallel background workflows. The plumbing is in place — what we build on it comes next.

---

[Read on site](https://daneel.injen.io/news/background-tasks.html?utm_source=extension_news_reader&utm_medium=extension_settings&utm_campaign=extension)