How do I asynchronously run things? I used Drupal 7.14, Video Module 7.x-2.5, VideoJS 7.x-2.0 HTML5 player, and ffmpeg 0.7.2 to transcode a 200mb mp4 video into Ogg, Flv, MP4 formats. The process worked, but took over 1 hour. Using the command line, I can file transfer and transcode same file in under 15 minutes. 

Aside from upping server processing power, or wishing that Drush handled video transcoding via ffmpeg, is anyone else off-loading Drupal processes via PhP Process Forking, or Asynchronously via Javascript, ie. node.js?

Ideally, once I click save on any Drupal form, a child process should spawn and work on the side, as I go about doing other things, without my admin interface locking up to process one thing (synchronous coding). Thanks for your time,
Look into the HTTP Parallel Request &amp; Threading Library. The Imageinfo Cache module uses it to generate imagecache presets when a file is uploaded on a node form, and does a final check on node save; all in the background. The other module to look into using is Background Process, it does similar thing as HTTPRL and the 2 modules are actually looking to merge together (http://drupal.org/node/1357652). 

An example of how to flush caches in the background is in the httprl readme