good_job VS Que

Once we are done with default gems, should we look into something we usually use? That's jwt because we need session tokens for our API. Next comes our one and only sidekiq. For a long period of time it was the best in town solution for background jobs. Now we could also consider solid_queue or good_job. In development and testing groups we need rspec-rails, factory_bot_rails and ffaker. Dealing with money? Start doing it properly from the beginning! Do not forget to install money-rails. Once everything is added to the Gemfile do not forget to trigger bundle install.

In the world of Ruby, GoodJob [0] has been doing a _good job_ so far.

[0] - https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

For Rails apps, you can do this using the ActiveJob interface via

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

Had it in production for about a quarter and it’s worked well.

Idk about pgagent but any table is a resilient queue with the multiple locks available in pg along with some SELECT pg_advisory_lock or SELECT FOR UPDATE queries, and/or LISTEN/NOTIFY.

Several bg job libs are built around native locking functionality

> Relies upon Postgres integrity, session-level Advisory Locks to provide run-once safety and stay within the limits of schema.rb, and LISTEN/NOTIFY to reduce queuing latency.

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

> |> lock("FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED")

https://github.com/sorentwo/oban/blob/8acfe4dcfb3e55bbf233aa...

The suggestion from /u/tofus is a good one. If you are already using redis as your ActionCable adapter I would use sidekiq. If not and you're using postgres I would consider https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

Probably worth mentioning that aside from delayed_job there are at least two more modern alternatives backed by the DB: Que and good_job.

Good article. Sidekiq is a good, well respected too. However if you are starting out I would recommend not using it, and instead choosing a DB based queue system. We have great success with que, but there are others like good_job.

Sidekiq Pro is great, we're paying for it! 10k a year I think.

But for people who are interested in alternatives, I'd also suggest Good Job (runs on Postgresql).

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

I'm the GoodJob author. Here's the class that is responsible for implementing Postgres's LISTEN/NOTIFY functionality in GoodJob:

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job/blob/10e9d9b714a668dc...

That's heavily inspired by Rail's Action Cable (websockets) Adapter for Postgres, which is a bit simpler and easier to understand:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/be287ac0d5000e667510faba...

Briefly, it spins up a background thread with a dedicated database connection and doings a blocking Postgres LISTEN query returns results, and then it forwards the result to other subscribing objects.

In this case I would try to set up tcn (a Postgres extension) and a trigger that inserts a job in a goodjob jobs table. https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job is like sidekiq but uses Postgres as a queue.

> Can you define "low throughput"?

<1000 messages per minute

Not saying SKIP LOCKED can't work with that many. But you'll probably want to do something better.

FWIW, Que uses advisory locks [1]

[1] https://github.com/que-rb/que

Probably worth mentioning that aside from delayed_job there are at least two more modern alternatives backed by the DB: Que and good_job.

Good article. Sidekiq is a good, well respected too. However if you are starting out I would recommend not using it, and instead choosing a DB based queue system. We have great success with que, but there are others like good_job.

(not sure why this comment was dead, I vouched for it)

There are a lot of ways to implement a queue in an RDBMS and a lot of those ways are naive to locking behavior. That said, with PostgreSQL specifically, there are some techniques that result in an efficient queue without locking problems. The article doesn't really talk about their implementation so we can't know what they did, but one open source example is Que[1]. Que uses a combination of advisory locking rather than row-level locks and notification channels to great effect, as you can read in the README.

[1]: https://github.com/que-rb/que

https://github.com/que-rb/que

This one seems to be the most performant. By a lot too, from my understanding (haven't ran any benchmark myself, but the readme shows some good postgres knowledge)

Que seems like a good alternative if one doesn't want to use Reids. However, given that most apps need Redis (and have it within their infrastructure) nowadays, I still think that Sidekiq is the better option in the generic case.

Implementations that use advisory locks like https://github.com/que-rb/que are much more efficient (atleast when I last tested) and will easily reach 10k job/s on even very modest hardware.

There is a Go port of Que but you can also easily port it to any language you like. I have a currently non-OSS implementation in Rust that I might OSS someday when I have time to clean it up.

It’s also possible to use advisory locks to implement a job queue in Postgres. See e.g. Que[1]. Note there are a fair number of corner cases, so studying Que is wise if trying to implement something like this, as well as some (a bit older) elaboration[2].

We implemented a similar design to Que for a specific use case in our application that has a known low volume of jobs and for a variety of reasons benefits from this design over other solutions.

[1]: https://github.com/que-rb/que

Do also take into consideration que-scheduler (disclaimer, am author). It is built on top of the robust que async job system.