I have a Craft website that has become quite big with several dozen sections and many templates - my first bigish Craft site - being a local government one with more than a thousand pages, forms and assets.
The Task Icon (I think is its name) had indicated there were uncompleted tasks and this has been stuck there for a couple of months while the site was being built and there have been many content and structure updates during this time.
Eventually I got around to attending to the issue after several half hearted attempts at finding out "what that stupid circle meant" (embarrassed much). A few minutes ago I followed the instructions at http://buildwithcraft.com/help/stuck-tasks and the task list was released like opening a flood gate - "hundreds"(?) of them suddenly ran, mostly "Resaving Meetings entries", Meetings being one of my sections, "Importing csv files" (which had consistently failed before, I now know why) plus "Updating element slugs and URIs". Also "Deleting stale template caches" which might explain another headache.
I'm now wondering if this will likely have any undesired impact on the site content given that I am now worried about old data replacing the new via Imports, Resaving, and Updating that has carried on. I'm not a content editor on the site so I am not too familiar with what should be the right data set and business only opens again in about 12 hours.
Can anyone advise on what these tasks might do if run as a very delayed process?