Wearing my Ruby T-Shirt (ok, Rubyconf.TH, but you get the gist) while reading this makes me fully approving and appreciating your post! It totally resonates with my current project setups and my trying to get them as simple as possible.
Especially when building new and unproven applications I'm always looking for things that trade the time I need to set tings up properly with he time I need to BUILD THE ACTUAL PRODUCT. Therefore I really like the recent changes to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem very much.
What we need is a larger user base setting everything up and discovering edge-cases and (!) writing about it (AND notifying the people around Rails). The more experience and knowledge there is, the better the tooling becomes. The happy path needs to become as broad as a road!
Like Kamal, at first only used by 36signals and now used by them and me. :D At least, of course.
Every time some production environment can be simplified, it is good news in my opinion. The ideal situation with Rails would be if there is a simple way to switch back to Redis, so that you can start simple, and as soon as you hit some fundamental issue with using SolidQueue (mostly scalability, I guess, in environments where the queue is truly stressed -- and you don't want to have a Postgres scalability problem because of your queue), you have a simple upgrade path. But I bet a lot of Rails apps don't have high volumes, and having to maintain two systems can be just more complexity.
the problem i see here is that we end up treating the background job/task processor as part of the production system (e.g. the server that responds to requests, in the case of a web application) instead of a separate standalone thing. rails doesn’t make this distinction clear enough. it’s okay to back your tasks processor with a pg database (e.g. river[0]) but, as you indirectly pointed out, it shouldn’t be the same as the production database. this is why redis was preferred anyways: it was a lightweight database for the task processor to store state, etc. there’s still great arguments in favor of this setup. from what i’ve seen so far, solidqueue doesn’t make this separation.
For people that does not think it scales. A similar implementation in Elixir is Oban. Their benchmark shows a million jobs per minute on a single node (and I am sure it could be increased further with more optimizations). I bet 99,99999% of apps have less than a million background jobs per minute.
> Job latency under 1ms is critical to your business. This is a real and pressing concern for real-time bidding, high frequency trading (HFT), and other applications in the same ilk.
From TFA. Are there really people using Rails for HFT?
The one use case where a DB backed queue will fail for sure is when the payload is large. For example, you queue a large JSON payload to be picked up by a worker and process it, then the DB writing overhead itself makes a background worker useless.
I've benchmarked Redis (Sidekiq), Postgres (using GoodJob) and SQLite (SolidQueue), Redis beats everything else for the above usecase.
SolidQueue backed by SQLite may be good when you are just passing around primary keys. I still wonder if you can have a lot of workers polling from the same database and update the queue with the job status. I've done something similar in the past using SQLite for some personal work and it is easy to hit the wall even with 10 or so workers.
I'm guessing you're with that adding indirection for what you're actually processing, in that case? So I guess the counter-case would be when you don't want/need that indirection.
If I understand what you're saying, is that you'll instead of doing:
- Create job with payload (maybe big) > Put in queue > Let worker take from queue > Done
You're suggesting:
- Create job with ID of payload (stored elsewhere) > Put in queue > Let worker take from queue, then resolve ID to the data needed for processing > Done
Is that more or less what you mean? I can definitively see use cases for both, heavily depends on the situation, but more indirection isn't always better, nor isn't big payloads always OK.
Interesting migration story! I've been using Redis for background jobs for years and it's been solid, but the operational overhead is real.
Curious about your experience with SolidQueue's reliability - have you run into any edge cases or issues with job retries/failures? Redis has been battle-tested for so long that switching always feels risky.
Would love to hear more about your production experience after a few months!
Email is in my profile. I’m currently building something in this space and I’m looking for early adopters. Reach out, I’d love to show you what we have!
For Node.js, my startup used to use [Graphile Worker](https://github.com/graphile/worker) which utilised the same "SKIP LOCKED" mechanism under the hood.
We ran into some serious issues in high throughput scenarios (~2k jobs/min currently, and ~5k job/min during peak hours) and switched to Redis+BullMQ and have never looked back ever since.
Our bottleneck was Postgres performance.
I wonder if SolidQueue runs into similar issues during high load, high throughput scenarios...
Nice article, I'm just productionising a Rails 8 app and was wondering whether it was worth switching from SolidQueue (which has given me no stress in dev) to Redis ... maybe not.
Comparing Redis to SQL is kinda off topic. Sure you can replace the one with the other but then we are talking about completely different concepts aren't we?
When all we are talking about is "good enough" the bar is set at a whole different level.
Especially when building new and unproven applications I'm always looking for things that trade the time I need to set tings up properly with he time I need to BUILD THE ACTUAL PRODUCT. Therefore I really like the recent changes to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem very much.
What we need is a larger user base setting everything up and discovering edge-cases and (!) writing about it (AND notifying the people around Rails). The more experience and knowledge there is, the better the tooling becomes. The happy path needs to become as broad as a road!
Like Kamal, at first only used by 36signals and now used by them and me. :D At least, of course.
Kudos!
Best, Steviee
[0]: https://riverqueue.com/
https://oban.pro/articles/one-million-jobs-a-minute-with-oba...
From TFA. Are there really people using Rails for HFT?
I've benchmarked Redis (Sidekiq), Postgres (using GoodJob) and SQLite (SolidQueue), Redis beats everything else for the above usecase.
SolidQueue backed by SQLite may be good when you are just passing around primary keys. I still wonder if you can have a lot of workers polling from the same database and update the queue with the job status. I've done something similar in the past using SQLite for some personal work and it is easy to hit the wall even with 10 or so workers.
If I understand what you're saying, is that you'll instead of doing:
- Create job with payload (maybe big) > Put in queue > Let worker take from queue > Done
You're suggesting:
- Create job with ID of payload (stored elsewhere) > Put in queue > Let worker take from queue, then resolve ID to the data needed for processing > Done
Is that more or less what you mean? I can definitively see use cases for both, heavily depends on the situation, but more indirection isn't always better, nor isn't big payloads always OK.
That being said, I regret that we have switched from good_job (https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job). The thing is - Basecamp is a MySQL shop and their policy is not to accept RDMS engine specific queries. You can see in their issues in Github that they try to stick "universal" SQL and are personally mostly concerned how it performs in MySQL(https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/issues/567#issuecomment... , https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/issues/508#issuecomment...). They also still have no support for batch jobs: https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/pull/142 .
https://nanovms.com/dev/tutorials/running-postgres-as-a-unik...
Turns out it is a matter of feature set.
Curious about your experience with SolidQueue's reliability - have you run into any edge cases or issues with job retries/failures? Redis has been battle-tested for so long that switching always feels risky.
Would love to hear more about your production experience after a few months!
We ran into some serious issues in high throughput scenarios (~2k jobs/min currently, and ~5k job/min during peak hours) and switched to Redis+BullMQ and have never looked back ever since. Our bottleneck was Postgres performance.
I wonder if SolidQueue runs into similar issues during high load, high throughput scenarios...
When all we are talking about is "good enough" the bar is set at a whole different level.