Sidekiq

We use Sidekiq to process millions of Ruby background jobs a day under normal loads. We sometimes process more than that when running one-off backfill tasks.

With so many jobs, it wouldn't really make sense to use delayed_job, as it would put our main database under unnecessary load, which would make it a bottleneck with most DB queries serving jobs and not end users. I suppose you could create a separate DB just for jobs, but that can be a hassle. Sidekiq uses a separate Redis instance so you don't have this problem. And it is very performant!

I also like that its free version comes "batteries included" with:

• A web monitoring UI that provides some nice stats.
• An API that can come in handy for one-off tasks, like changing the queue of certain already enqueued jobs.

Sidekiq is a pleasure to use. All our engineers love it!

I'm building a new process management tool. I decided to build with Rails as my backend, using Sidekiq for background jobs. I chose to work with these tools because I've worked with them before and know that they're able to get the job done. They may not be the sexiest tools, but they work and are reliable, which is what I was optimizing for. For data stores, I opted for PostgreSQL and Redis. Because I'm planning on offering dashboards, I wanted a SQL database instead of something like MongoDB that might work early on, but be difficult to use as soon as I want to facilitate aggregate queries.

On the front-end I'm using Vue.js and vuex in combination with #Turbolinks. In effect, I want to render most pages on the server side without key interactions being managed by Vue.js . This is the first project I'm working on where I've explicitly decided not to include jQuery . I have found React and Redux.js more confusing to setup. I appreciate the opinionated approach from the Vue.js community and that things just work together the way that I'd expect. To manage my javascript dependencies, I'm using Yarn .

For CSS frameworks, I'm using #Bulma.io. I really appreciate it's minimal nature and that there are no hard javascript dependencies. And to add a little spice, I'm using #font-awesome.

delayed_job is a great Rails background job library for new projects, as it only uses what you already have: a relational database. We happily used it during the company’s first two years.

But it started to falter as our web and database transactions significantly grew. Our app interacted with users via SMS texts sent inside background jobs. Because the delayed_job daemon ran every couple seconds, this meant that users often waited several long seconds before getting text replies, which was not acceptable. Moreover, job processing was done inside AWS Elastic Beanstalk web instances, which were already under stress and not meant to handle jobs.

We needed a fast background job system that could process jobs in near real-time and integrate well with AWS. Sidekiq is a fast and popular Ruby background job library, but it does not leverage the Elastic Beanstalk worker architecture, and you have to maintain a Redis instance.

We ended up choosing active-elastic-job, which seamlessly integrates with worker instances and Amazon SQS. SQS is a fast queue and you don’t need to worry about infrastructure or scaling, as AWS handles it for you.

We noticed significant performance gains immediately after making the switch.

#BackgroundProcessing

Sidekiq is used extensively for a multitude of background jobs, everything from audio/video post-processing to sending push notifications. Sidekiq

We offload our background processing tasks (photo sizing, watermarking, etc.) to Sidekiq to keep our app's performance optimal. Sidekiq

Background processing of Pushover push notifications to admins when sales occur, payments processing via Pin Payments, Campaign Monitor transaction email sending, and Intercom event API posting. Sidekiq

We turn to Sidekiq when we need to run background jobs in a Rails app, which we do for just about every Rails app we write. We especially like the ops tools that come with Sidekiq, which make it easy to monitor and maintain. Sidekiq