Sidekiq

Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby.

Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.

Sidekiq is compatible with Resque. It uses the exact same message format as Resque so it can integrate into an existing Resque processing farm. You can have Sidekiq and Resque run side-by-side at the same time and use the Resque client to enqueue jobs in Redis to be processed by Sidekiq.

At the same time, Sidekiq uses multithreading so it is much more memory efficient than Resque (which forks a new process for every job). You'll find that you might need 10 200MB resque processes to peg your CPU whereas one 300MB Sidekiq process will peg the same CPU and perform the same amount of work.

Requirements

I test with the latest MRI (2.1, 2.0) and JRuby versions (1.7). Other versions/VMs are untested but might work fine. MRI 1.9 is no longer supported.

The last two major Rails releases (3.2 and 4.0) are officially supported, other versions might work fine.

Redis 2.4 or greater is required.

Installation

gem install sidekiq

Getting Started

See the sidekiq home page for the simple 3-step process. You can watch Railscast #366 to see Sidekiq in action. If you do everything right, you should see this:

Want to Upgrade?

I also sell Sidekiq Pro, an extension to Sidekiq which provides more features, a commercial-friendly license and allows you to support high quality open source development all at the same time. Please see the Sidekiq Pro homepage for more detail.

More Information

Please see the sidekiq wiki for the official documentation. #sidekiq on irc.freenode.net is dedicated to this project, but bug reports or feature requests suggestions should still go through issues on Github. Release announcements are made to the @sidekiq Twitter account.

You may also find useful a Google Group dedicated to Sidekiq discussion and a Sidekiq tag on Stack Overflow.

Problems?

Please do not directly email any Sidekiq committers with questions or problems. A community is best served when discussions are held in public.

If you have a problem, please review the FAQ and Troubleshooting wiki pages. Searching the issues for your problem is also a good idea. If that doesn't help, feel free to email the Sidekiq mailing list or open a new issue. The mailing list is the preferred place to ask questions on usage. If you are encountering what you think is a bug, please open an issue.

Thanks

Sidekiq stays fast by using the JProfiler java profiler to find and fix performance problems on JRuby. Unfortunately MRI does not have good profile tooling.

License

Please see LICENSE for licensing details.

Author

Mike Perham, @mperham / @sidekiq, http://mikeperham.com / http://www.contribsys.com