Resque vs DelayedJob

How does Resque compare to DelayedJob, and why would you choose one over the other?

  • Resque supports multiple queues
  • DelayedJob supports finer grained priorities
  • Resque workers are resilient to memory leaks / bloat
  • DelayedJob workers are extremely simple and easy to modify
  • Resque requires Redis
  • DelayedJob requires ActiveRecord
  • Resque can only place JSONable Ruby objects on a queue as arguments
  • DelayedJob can place any Ruby object on its queue as arguments
  • Resque includes a Sinatra app for monitoring what’s going on
  • DelayedJob can be queried from within your Rails app if you want to add an interface

If you’re doing Rails development, you already have a database and ActiveRecord. DelayedJob is super easy to setup and works great. GitHub used it for many months to process almost 200 million jobs.

Choose Resque if:

  • You need multiple queues
  • You don’t care / dislike numeric priorities
  • You don’t need to persist every Ruby object ever
  • You have potentially huge queues
  • You want to see what’s going on
  • You expect a lot of failure / chaos
  • You can setup Redis
  • You’re not running short on RAM

Choose DelayedJob if:

  • You like numeric priorities
  • You’re not doing a gigantic amount of jobs each day
  • Your queue stays small and nimble
  • There is not a lot failure / chaos
  • You want to easily throw anything on the queue
  • You don’t want to setup Redis

In no way is Resque a “better” DelayedJob, so make sure you pick the tool that’s best for your app.