Delayed::Job

Delated_job (or DJ) encapsulates the common pattern of asynchronously executing longer tasks in the background.

It is a direct extraction from Shopify where the job table is responsible for a multitude of core tasks. Amongst those tasks are:

  • sending massive newsletters
  • image resizing
  • http downloads
  • updating smart collections
  • updating solr, our search server, after product changes
  • batch imports
  • spam checks

Koombea’s fork adds a user and object relationship to the table in case you need the relationships for stats or queue monitoring.

Installation

To install as a gem, add the following to config/environment.rb:


config.gem 'koombea-delayed_job', :lib => 'delayed_job'

Rake tasks are not automatically loaded from gems, so you’ll need to add the following to your Rakefile:


begin
  require 'delayed/tasks'
rescue LoadError
  STDERR.puts "Run `rake gems:install` to install delayed_job"
end

To install as a plugin:


script/plugin install git://github.com/koombea/delayed_job.git

After delayed_job is installed, run:


script/generate delayed_job
rake db:migrate

Upgrading to 1.8

If you are upgrading from a previous release, you will need to generate the new script/delayed_job:


script/generate delayed_job --skip-migration

Queuing Jobs

Call #send_later(method, params) on any object and it will be processed in the background.


# without delayed_job
Notifier.(@user)

# with delayed_job
Notifier.send_later :deliver_signup, @user

If a method should always be run in the background, you can call #handle_asynchronously after the method declaration:


class Device
  def deliver
    # long running method
  end
  handle_asynchronously :deliver
end

device = Device.new
device.deliver

Running Jobs

script/delayed_job can be used to manage a background process which will start working off jobs.


$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job stop

# Runs two workers in separate processes.
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job -n 2 start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job stop

Workers can be running on any computer, as long as they have access to the database and their clock is in sync. Keep in mind that each worker will check the database at least every 5 seconds.

You can also invoke rake jobs:work which will start working off jobs. You can cancel the rake task with CTRL-C.

Custom Jobs

Jobs are simple ruby objects with a method called perform. Any object which responds to perform can be stuffed into the jobs table. Job objects are serialized to yaml so that they can later be resurrected by the job runner.


class NewsletterJob < Struct.new(:text, :emails)
  def perform
    emails.each { |e| NewsletterMailer.deliver_text_to_email(text, e) }
  end    
end  
  
Delayed::Job.enqueue NewsletterJob.new('lorem ipsum...', Customers.find(:all).collect(&:email))

== Koombea edit == To send user and object id’s simply use:


	Delayed::Job.enqueue NewsletterJob.new('lorem ipsum...', Customers.find(:all).collect(&:email)), priority, run_at, user_id, object_id

Gory Details

The library evolves around a delayed_jobs table which looks as follows:

create_table :delayed_jobs, :force => true do |table| table.integer :priority, :default => 0 # Allows some jobs to jump to the front of the queue table.integer :attempts, :default => 0 # Provides for retries, but still fail eventually. table.text :handler # YAML-encoded string of the object that will do work table.text :last_error # reason for last failure (See Note below) table.datetime :run_at # When to run. Could be Time.zone.now for immediately, or sometime in the future. table.datetime :locked_at # Set when a client is working on this object table.datetime :failed_at # Set when all retries have failed (actually, by default, the record is deleted instead) table.string :locked_by # Who is working on this object (if locked) table.timestamps end

On failure, the job is scheduled again in 5 seconds + N ** 4, where N is the number of retries.

The default Job::max_attempts is 25. After this, the job either deleted (default), or left in the database with “failed_at” set. With the default of 25 attempts, the last retry will be 20 days later, with the last interval being almost 100 hours.

The default Job::max_run_time is 4.hours. If your job takes longer than that, another computer could pick it up. It’s up to you to make sure your job doesn’t exceed this time. You should set this to the longest time you think the job could take.

By default, it will delete failed jobs (and it always deletes successful jobs). If you want to keep failed jobs, set Delayed::Job.destroy_failed_jobs = false. The failed jobs will be marked with non-null failed_at.

Here is an example of changing job parameters in Rails:


# config/initializers/delayed_job_config.rb
Delayed::Job.destroy_failed_jobs = false
silence_warnings do
  Delayed::Worker::sleep_delay = 60
  Delayed::Job::max_attempts = 3
  Delayed::Job::max_run_time = 5.minutes
end

Cleaning up

You can invoke rake jobs:clear to delete all jobs in the queue.

Mailing List

Join us on the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/delayed_job