Resque vs Sidekiq vs delayed_job: What are the differences?

Introduction

Resque, Sidekiq, and Delayed Job are popular background job management systems in Ruby on Rails. They provide a way to asynchronously process tasks and handle heavy processing operations outside of the normal request-response cycle. While they all serve the same purpose, there are key differences between them.

1. Concurrency Model: Resque uses a multi-process approach, where each job is processed by a separate worker process. This allows for parallel processing of jobs, but it can be resource-intensive and potentially slower with a high number of jobs. Sidekiq, on the other hand, uses a multi-threaded approach, where jobs are processed within the same process using multiple worker threads. This allows for better resource utilization and faster job processing. Delayed Job also uses a multi-process approach like Resque, but it does not support multi-threading.

2. Job Priority: Sidekiq and Delayed Job support job priority out of the box. This means that you can specify a priority for each job, and the system will prioritize the processing of higher priority jobs. Resque, however, does not have built-in support for job priority. Jobs in Resque are processed in the order they are enqueued.

3. Redis Dependency: Resque and Sidekiq both depend on Redis for storing job queues and job-related data. Delayed Job, on the other hand, can use different backends for storing job data, including the database. This can be beneficial if your application is already using a database and you don't want to introduce an additional dependency on Redis.

4. Retry and Error Handling: Sidekiq has built-in support for retrying failed jobs with backoff strategies, allowing for automatic job retries with increasing delays between retries. Resque and Delayed Job also support retrying failed jobs, but they require additional configurations and custom code to achieve similar behavior.

5. Monitoring and Dashboard: Sidekiq provides a built-in monitoring dashboard that allows you to track the status of jobs, view processing statistics, and pause/resume job processing. Resque and Delayed Job do not have built-in monitoring dashboards, but you can use third-party tools or build your own monitoring system.

6. Active Job Integration: Delayed Job seamlessly integrates with Rails' Active Job framework, allowing you to use a consistent API for working with background jobs. Resque and Sidekiq also have Active Job adapters available, but they are separate gems that need to be installed and configured separately.

In summary, Resque, Sidekiq, and Delayed Job are popular background job management systems in Ruby on Rails, but they differ in terms of concurrency model, job priority support, backend dependency, retry and error handling, monitoring capabilities, and Active Job integration.