GHghiculescu·Feb 16, 2022
Rails 7 support only just got added https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job/pull/1161
In Delayed Job vs. Sidekiqcollectiveidea
delayed_job
Ruby2012–2022
collectiveidea / delayed_job
delayed_job
Database based asynchronous priority queue system -- Extracted from Shopify
8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Database based asynchronous priority queue system -- Extracted from Shopify
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-03-02 11:29:32 UTC to 2022-02-16 20:11:14 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesSeems maintained to me:
https://rubygems.org/gems/delayed_job
https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job
In Delayed Job vs. SidekiqWhat Jon Richards said. Also see https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job which is a popular DB-based scheduling library for Ruby.
In Ask HN: When does it make sense to roll your own X?Regarding #2, the Ruby sensibility on pulling in dependencies is very different than the Node world's.
As an arbitrary example, consider the deps of two similar packages, delayed_job (Ruby, https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job) and Kue (JS, https://github.com/Automattic/kue).
Delayed_job has two dependencies if you're running on Ruby (rather than JRuby): rake and sqlite3. Neither rake nor sqlite3 have any dependencies of their own - in production mode, of course.
On the other hand, Kue has nine direct dependencies, each of which have their own. The full dependency tree of Kue has one hundred and eighty two separate dependencies.
In Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstarRegarding queues, Delayed Job [0] is a popular queue abstraction over a SQL database that suggests the impedance mismatch in this case may be successfully mitigated.
[0] https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job
In What is ‘skip locked’ for in PostgreSQL 9.5? (2016)delayed_job if you don't want to run Redis https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job
In How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a monthThe repo you linked to is dead. DJ is in active development at https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job.
In Rails 4.2 releasedCode-wise: Delayed::Job https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job
Design-wise: Two queue worker processes independent of web server processes. Delayed::Job lets you assign tasks a priority and lets you assign queue workers to priority levels it is allowed to look at. By convention, priority 0 (highest) is interactive tasks in my applications (a user is at their keyboard waiting for an answer) and priority 10 (least priority) is, well, Mixpanel. Not because I don't love them, just because if Mixpanel blocks for an entire month my rent still gets paid and that isn't true of any other priority level.
Queue worker A only works on priorities 0 through 9. Queue worker B works on 0 through 10. This ensures that even if Mixpanel (or Kissmetrics, also on 10) perpetually times out the higher-priority levels will never be totally blocked.
D
Read the rest
elayed::Job worker processes are monitored by god, which resets them if they fail, become bloated, etc. They're also separately monitored by Scout monitoring's DJ plugin, which fires a yellow alert if a job is ever older than an hour (shouldn't happen but can in event of e.g. an API outage) or a red alert if there's ever more than X jobs in the queue (high probability that this represents a crash god can't recover from).
Because even that setup was letting through about one outage every six months to a year, I have one other ace-in-the-hole: my ajax polling actions which check whether particular jobs are complete will, if they fail Y times in a row, a) instantiate a queue worker within the web server process (this degrades request processing but can't totally break the site) and b) fire off an independent-from-everything-else phone call to my cell phone saying "Your first, second, and third line of defense have failed. Get ye to an SSH terminal."
At LayerVault, we're using delayed_job (https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job) for our queuing system. Everything goes through a database, so the performance won't be as good as something in memory. Also, I feel safer with the workers only communicating with queue servers and not with application servers. Just a litte more abstraction :)
In Async Task Queues