Celery vs Sidekiq

Overview

Celery

Stacks1.7K

Followers1.6K

Votes280

GitHub Stars27.5K

Forks4.9K

Sidekiq

Stacks1.2K

Followers632

Votes408

Celery vs Sidekiq: What are the differences?

Celery and Sidekiq are two popular task queue systems used for background processing in web applications. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Concurrency and Scalability: Celery is known for its ability to handle a large number of tasks concurrently by utilizing multiple workers. It supports distributed task queue architectures, making it highly scalable. On the other hand, Sidekiq is built on Ruby and relies on threads for concurrency. While Sidekiq can also handle a significant number of jobs concurrently, it may not be as scalable as Celery when it comes to distributed architectures.
Language Support: Celery is language-agnostic and can be used with various programming languages, including Python, Java, and Ruby. It provides a consistent interface regardless of the programming language being used. In contrast, Sidekiq is primarily designed for Ruby applications and offers seamless integration with Ruby on Rails. It may not provide the same level of support for other programming languages as Celery.
Message Broker: Celery requires a message broker, such as RabbitMQ, Redis, or Amazon SQS, to handle the communication between the client and the worker processes. This allows for reliable communication and fault-tolerance. On the other hand, Sidekiq relies on Redis as its message broker, which provides a simple and lightweight solution but may not offer the same level of reliability and fault-tolerance as some of the message brokers supported by Celery.
Monitoring and Management: Celery provides a built-in monitoring and management tool called Flower, which allows users to view the status and progress of tasks, monitor worker activity, and overall system health. Sidekiq, on the other hand, does not have a dedicated monitoring tool built into its core. However, there are third-party options available, such as Sidekiq Pro or Sidekiq Enteprise, that offer advanced monitoring and management features.
Community and Ecosystem: Celery has a large and active community, with extensive documentation, plugins, and integrations available. It has been around for many years and is widely used in production environments. Sidekiq also has a substantial user base and a growing ecosystem, but it may not have the same level of maturity and support as Celery.
Performance Impact: Celery, being a distributed task queue system, introduces some overhead due to the communication between the client and worker processes. While this overhead is usually minimal and can be mitigated by scalable architecture, it may have a slightly higher performance impact compared to Sidekiq, which relies on lightweight threads for concurrency.

In summary, Celery and Sidekiq are both popular task queue systems used in distributed computing, with Celery being primarily associated with Python and Sidekiq with Ruby. While Celery offers robust support for Python applications and integrates well with Django and Flask, Sidekiq is known for its efficient processing of background jobs in Ruby on Rails applications, leveraging Redis for its backend storage.

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Advice on Celery, Sidekiq

Shantha

Sep 30, 2020

Needs adviceon

RabbitMQ

Celery

MongoDB

I am just a beginner at these two technologies.

Problem statement: I am getting lakh of users from the sequel server for whom I need to create caches in MongoDB by making different REST API requests.

Here these users can be treated as messages. Each REST API request is a task.

I am confused about whether I should go for RabbitMQ alone or Celery.

If I have to go with RabbitMQ, I prefer to use python with Pika module. But the challenge with Pika is, it is not thread-safe. So I am not finding a way to execute a lakh of API requests in parallel using multiple threads using Pika.

If I have to go with Celery, I don't know how I can achieve better scalability in executing these API requests in parallel.

334k views334k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Celery	Sidekiq
Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.	Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 27.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.9K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 1.6K	Followers 632
Votes 280	Votes 408
Pros & Cons
Pros 99 Task queue 63 Python integration 40 Django integration 30 Scheduled Task 19 Publish/subsribe Cons 4 Sometimes loses tasks 1 Depends on broker	Pros 124 Simple 99 Efficient background processing 60 Scalability 37 Better then resque 26 Great documentation

What are some alternatives to Celery, Sidekiq?

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Beanstalkd

Beanstalks's interface is generic, but was originally designed for reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running time-consuming tasks asynchronously.

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

Related Comparisons

Celery vs Sidekiq: What are the differences?

Celery and Sidekiq are two popular task queue systems used for background processing in web applications. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Concurrency and Scalability: Celery is known for its ability to handle a large number of tasks concurrently by utilizing multiple workers. It supports distributed task queue architectures, making it highly scalable. On the other hand, Sidekiq is built on Ruby and relies on threads for concurrency. While Sidekiq can also handle a significant number of jobs concurrently, it may not be as scalable as Celery when it comes to distributed architectures.
Language Support: Celery is language-agnostic and can be used with various programming languages, including Python, Java, and Ruby. It provides a consistent interface regardless of the programming language being used. In contrast, Sidekiq is primarily designed for Ruby applications and offers seamless integration with Ruby on Rails. It may not provide the same level of support for other programming languages as Celery.
Message Broker: Celery requires a message broker, such as RabbitMQ, Redis, or Amazon SQS, to handle the communication between the client and the worker processes. This allows for reliable communication and fault-tolerance. On the other hand, Sidekiq relies on Redis as its message broker, which provides a simple and lightweight solution but may not offer the same level of reliability and fault-tolerance as some of the message brokers supported by Celery.
Monitoring and Management: Celery provides a built-in monitoring and management tool called Flower, which allows users to view the status and progress of tasks, monitor worker activity, and overall system health. Sidekiq, on the other hand, does not have a dedicated monitoring tool built into its core. However, there are third-party options available, such as Sidekiq Pro or Sidekiq Enteprise, that offer advanced monitoring and management features.
Community and Ecosystem: Celery has a large and active community, with extensive documentation, plugins, and integrations available. It has been around for many years and is widely used in production environments. Sidekiq also has a substantial user base and a growing ecosystem, but it may not have the same level of maturity and support as Celery.
Performance Impact: Celery, being a distributed task queue system, introduces some overhead due to the communication between the client and worker processes. While this overhead is usually minimal and can be mitigated by scalable architecture, it may have a slightly higher performance impact compared to Sidekiq, which relies on lightweight threads for concurrency.

Celery vs Sidekiq

Overview