Creating a Background Thread When the Web Site First Starts

There have been several instances along the way where a Web application I am developing would be served by having a thread periodically spin up to perform a needed task at a specified interval. For example the application may need to log the state of some variables every hour on the hour or perform an update against a database. I have found there are two ways to set this in motion, through the Application_Start event handler in the Global.asax file or by creating a custom httpModule. Either way the same worker method can be called to perform the needed task.