Quiq

Quiq is a distributed task queue backed by Redis to process jobs in background.

It relies on asynchronous IOs to process multiple jobs simultaneously. The event loop is provided by the Async library and many other gems of the Socketry family.

It can be used without Rails, but will play nicely with ActiveJob even though it's not supported officialy (more details here).

The library is in a very early stage, it is not suitable for production yet.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'quiq'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install quiq

To launch the workers, you can use the quiq command.

Usage: quiq [options]
    -p, --path PATH                  Location of the workers to load
    -q, --queues NAMES               Comma-separated list of queues to poll
    -l, --log-level LEVEL            The logging level
    -v, --version                    Output version and exit
    -h, --help                       Show this message

This is how to use it with a Rails application using ActiveJob

$ bundle exec quiq -p ./config/environment.rb -q critical,medium,low -l WARN

Here is an example of a configuration within a Rails application:

Quiq.configure do |config|
  config.redis = 'redis://localhost:6379'
  config.logger = Rails.logger
end

As there is no official support for Quiq in ActiveJob, you must monkey patch it to use it as you would do with any other background jobs system. You can find a complete example here: testapp/config/initializers/quiq.rb

module ActiveJob
  module QueueAdapters
    class QuiqAdapter
      def enqueue(job)
        Quiq::Client.push(job)
      end

      def enqueue_at(job, timestamp)
        Quiq::Client.push(job, scheduled_at: timestamp)
      end

      class JobWrapper
        class << self
          def perform(job_data)
            Base.execute job_data
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

As it is using the Async gem, we can use the many features provided by this library.

You can access the underlying Async::Task by using Quiq.current_task.

A very dumb example:

class TestJob < ApplicationJob
  def perform(data, wait)
    puts "Receiving new job: #{data}"
    Quiq.current_task.sleep wait # Non blocking call
    puts "Time to wake up after #{wait} seconds"
  end
end

More interesting use case. If you combine quiq with the async-http gem, you'll be able to make asynchronous HTTP calls:

require 'uri'
require 'async/http/internet'

class HttpJob < ApplicationJob
  def perform(url)
    uri = URI(url)

    client = Async::HTTP::Internet.new
    response = client.get(url)
    Quiq.logger.info response.read
  end
end

Since Quiq supports ActiveJob interface you can use the same approach to schedule jobs for the future.

TestJob.set(wait: 5.seconds).perform_later(1, 2)

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec 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 tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

To benchmark the system you can use the quiqload binary. To launch it, execute:

$ time bin/quiqload -n 10_000 -w 1

Usage: quiqload [options]
    -n, --number JOBS                Number of jobs to enqueue
    -w, --wait DURATION              Idle time within each job (in seconds)
    -h, --help                       Show this message

• Graceful shutdown
• Customizable logger
• Dead-letter queue
• Scheduler
• Specs
• Retry system
• Batches support
• Load testing script
• Admin user interface
• Rate limiting capabilities

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

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