Jobify

Run any method as a background job with perform_my_method_later. Works with both instance and class methods.

Why?

I think we as Rails developers are not using background processing as much as we could / should.

I believe this is largely because of 3 things:

  • The extra work required to create a new MyTinyJob class
  • The added complexity from moving code away from its natural and cohesive location in the project and into app/jobs
  • The extra work required to maintain a tiny MyTinyJob class

In short, the activation energy to use background jobs is too high.

Jobify lowers the activation energy to jobify :my_method to generate an activejob job class, and calling perform_my_method_later

Usage

class SomeClass
  include Jobify

  def self.my_method(arg1, kw_arg:) 
    puts "...#{arg1} #{kw_arg}'s which would be handy to do async..."
  end
  jobify :my_method
end

SomeClass.perform_my_method_later(42, kw_arg: 'flum')

Output:

[ActiveJob] Enqueued SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job (Job ID: 8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832) to Async(default) with arguments: 42, {:kw_arg=>"flum"}
[ActiveJob] [SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job] [8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832] Performing SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job (Job ID: 8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832) from Async(default) enqueued at 2022-10-25T19:11:46Z with arguments: 42, {:kw_arg=>"flum"}
=>
#<SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job:0x00007fee638d9cb8
 @arguments=[42, {:kw_arg=>"flum"}],
 @exception_executions={},
 @executions=0,
 @job_id="8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832",
 @priority=nil,
 @provider_job_id="8dc0614f-a229-4648-9308-4e6add9f666c",
 @queue_name="default",
 @successfully_enqueued=true,
 @timezone=nil>
...42 flum's which would be handy to do async...
[ActiveJob] [SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job] [8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832] Performed SomeClass::JobifyClassMethod_my_method_Job (Job ID: 8fc2ca69-cb31-4f73-a908-e98acb8a2832) from Async(default) in 4.57ms

Features

  • Jobifies class methods
  • Jobifies instance methods
  • Verifies correct arguments are given when enqueing a job
  • Small overhead added: 0.06 ms boot and 0.1ms on perform
  • Override perform_xyz_later method with whatever name you prefer (eg. jobify :my_method, name: :my_method_async)

Instance methods

Instance methods work out of the box if your class inherits from ApplicationRecord or ActiveRecord::Base

If your class does not inherit from these it must supply #id and .find(id) methods to use jobify on instance methods.

How it works

Calling jobify :my_method will declare two things:

  • A new activejob job class as subclass of the class where it is called. This class #perform method will call the original method using public_send.
  • A perform_my_method_later method, which will perform the job later.
    • perform_my_method_later will raise unless given the same arguments as my_method.

Instance methods

Jobifying instance methods work by adding a special id keyword argument to JobifyInstanceMethod_xyz_Job#perform:

  • When called, #perform_xyz_later gets the id of the instance via instance#id.
  • The id is passed to the jobs #perform method as extra argument (:__jobify__record_id).
  • #perform method uses this to find the record and then run the instance method on the record.

Installation

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add jobify

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install jobify

Overhead

Benchmarks from running on a 2020 i7 Macbook Pro:

(Generate benchmarks by running BENCHMARK=10_000 rake test where env BENCHMARK is the number of iterations to run)

Benchmark boot: 0.058 ms on avg of 100000 iterations
Benchmark perform: 0.228 ms on avg of 100000 iterations
Benchmark perform_control: 0.128 ms on avg of 100000 iterations

Boot overhead:

Jobify adds ~ 0.06 ms avg overhead per call. So if you used jobify :something 100 times in your code, you would add ~ 6 ms overhead to boot time.

Run job overhead

Jobify adds ~ 0.1 ms overhead to running a job. Performing via jobify takes ~ 0.23 ms versus ~ 0.13 ms for normal ActiveJob execution. For all but the most massively-scheduled-all-the-time jobs, this should be fine.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

TODO

  • Allow to add options to jobify, eg. queue_as: :default
  • Allow to add global options, eg queue_as, prefix:, suffix:

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/houen/jobify.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.