zlacker

[return to "Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL"]
1. _ugfj+z2[view] [source] 2021-06-12 07:29:54
>>hyzyla+(OP)
You really don't need anything fancy to implement a queue using SQL. You need a table with a primary id and a "status" field. An "expired" field can be used instead of the "status". We used the latter because it allows easy retries.

1. SELECT item_id WHERE expire = 0. If this is empty, no items are available.

2. UPDATE SET expire = some_future_time WHERE item_id = $selected_item_id AND expire = 0. Then check whether UPDATE affected any rows. If it did, item_id is yours. If not, loop. If the database has a sane optimizer it'll note at most one document needs locking as the primary id is given.

All this needs is a very weak property: document level atomic UPDATE which can return whether it changed anything. (How weak? MongoDB could do that in 2009.)

Source code at https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/9.2.x/core/... (We cooked this up for Drupal in 2009 but I am reasonably sure we didn't invent anything new.)

Of course, this is not the fastest job queue there is but it is quite often good enough.

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2. virapt+lD[view] [source] 2021-06-12 14:21:20
>>_ugfj+z2
This sounds dangerous. Without some good way to prevent workers stepping on each other, that will result in lots of useless queries and failed updates if a lot of jobs get scheduled at the same time.

In the Drupal case, the database returns a single row which is pretty much guaranteed to be the same for all workers in between updates. You really don't want that in the same database your page views hit. At least selecting N rows at a time and then claiming a random item from them would be slightly better.

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3. virapt+xv1[view] [source] 2021-06-12 22:46:41
>>virapt+lD
I find the downvotes weird without any explanation why the raised issue doesn't sound important.
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