Backburner
A Ruby gem providing a simple and reliable beanstalkd-powered job queue for background processing.
What is Backburner?
Backburner is a Ruby gem that provides a job queue system powered by beanstalkd, enabling asynchronous processing of background tasks. It allows developers to enqueue jobs, manage multiple queues, set priorities, and handle retries, solving the need for reliable and scalable background job processing in Ruby applications.
Ruby developers building web applications with Rails, Sinatra, or Padrino who need a robust and simple background job processing solution.
Developers choose Backburner for its tight integration with beanstalkd, which offers built-in features like priorities, persistence, and speed without additional complexity, along with familiar patterns inspired by Resque and DelayedJob.
Overview
Simple and reliable beanstalkd job queue for ruby
Use Cases
Best For
- Processing high volumes of background jobs in Ruby web apps
- Handling email sending and newsletter delivery asynchronously
- Managing prioritized task queues with configurable retries
- Scheduling delayed jobs for future execution
- Integrating with Rails, Sinatra, or Padrino for job processing
- Building reliable job processing with beanstalkd as the backend
Not Ideal For
- Applications deployed on Windows that require forking-based concurrency models (e.g., ThreadsOnFork worker)
- Teams wanting an all-in-one solution with a built-in, feature-rich web dashboard for job monitoring
- Projects needing tight integration with ActiveRecord for transactional job persistence or database-backed queues
- Environments where managing an additional beanstalkd service is operationally prohibitive
Pros & Cons
Pros
Leverages beanstalkd's native features like priorities, persistence, and fast in-memory processing without extra gem code, ensuring high performance for job queues.
Supports both custom job classes and the async method for enqueuing any object's method, offering versatility similar to DelayedJob with minimal boilerplate.
Allows setting exponential back-off via retry_delay_proc and max_job_retries, providing robust error handling for transient failures, though defaults to no retries.
Includes Simple, Forking, ThreadsOnFork, and Threading workers to adapt to different concurrency needs, with options for forking or thread-based processing.
Cons
Relies on beanstalkd being installed and maintained separately, adding operational overhead compared to database-backed queues like DelayedJob.
Workers like ThreadsOnFork are incompatible with Windows due to lack of fork, restricting deployment options and requiring alternative setups.
Job arguments must be JSON-serializable, preventing direct passing of complex Ruby objects and forcing ID-based references, which can be limiting.
Out-of-the-box, max_job_retries is set to 0, meaning jobs fail silently without retries unless explicitly configured, risking data loss.
Open Source Alternative To
Backburner is an open-source alternative to the following products:
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
Delayed JobDatabase based asynchronous priority queue system -- Extracted from Shopify
good_jobMultithreaded, Postgres-based, Active Job backend for Ruby on Rails.
Sucker PunchSucker Punch is a Ruby asynchronous processing library using concurrent-ruby, heavily influenced by Sidekiq and girl_friday.
QueA Ruby job queue that uses PostgreSQL's advisory locks for speed and reliability.
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