GoodJob version 1.1 has been released. GoodJob is a multithreaded, Postgres-based, ActiveJob backend for Ruby on Rails. If you’re new to GoodJob, read the introductory blog post.

GoodJob’s v1.1 release contains a new, economical execution mode called “async” to execute jobs within the webserver process with the same reliability as a separate job worker process.

This release also contains more in-depth documentation based on feedback and questions I’ve received since the v1.0 release.

Version 1.1 comes out 3 weeks after GoodJob v1.0. The initial release of GoodJob was featured on Ruby Weekly, A Fresh Cup

, Awesome Ruby, and was as high as #8 on Hacker News. GoodJob has since received nearly 500 stars on Github.

Async mode

In addition to the $ good_job executable, GoodJob now can execute jobs inside the webserver process itself. For light workloads and simple applications, combining web and worker into a single process is very economical, especially when running on Heroku’s free or hobby plans.

GoodJob’s async execution is compatible with Puma, in multithreaded (RAILS_MAX_THREADS), multi-process (WEB_CONCURRENCY), and memory efficient preload_app! configurations. GoodJob is built with Concurrent Ruby which offers excellent thread and process-forking safety guarantees. Read the GoodJob async documentation for more details.

On a personal level, I’m very excited to have this feature in GoodJob. Async execution was the compelling reason I had previously adopted Que, another Postgres-based backend, in multiple projects and I was heartbroken when Que dropped support for async execution.

Improved documentation

Since GoodJob was released 3 weeks ago, the documentation has been significantly expanded. It contains more code and examples for ensuring reliability and handling job errors. I’ve had dozens of people ask questions through Github Issues and Ruby on Rails Link Slack.

Upcoming

In the next release, v1.2, I plan to simplify the creation of multiple dedicated threadpools within a single process. The goal is to provide an economical solution to congestion when the execution of a number of slow, low-priority jobs (elephants) are being performed and there are no execution resources available for newly introduced fast, high priority jobs (mice) until the currently executing elephants complete.

A proposed configuration, for example:

--queues=mice:2,elephants:4

…would allocate 2 dedicated threads for jobs enqueued on the mice queue, and 4 threads for the elephants queue. Learn more in the feature’s Github Issue.

Contribute

GoodJob continues to be enjoyable to develop and build upon Rails’ ActiveJob and Concurrent Ruby. Contributions are welcomed: check out the GoodJob Backlog, comment on or open a Github Issue, or make a Pull Request.