Context: First time usage of ActiveJob via Sidekiq and Redis.
Situation: Sidekiq and redis are installed and running (route /sidekiq does generate the control panel) and is polling.
Issue(s?): Installation on remote server and enabling rather opaque... which may explain whay a default defined job is not executing although the server is inactive.
Maybe the sequence of going through Rails, then Sidekiq, then redis documentation was mistaken.
Uncertainty #1: However, I finally picked up that redis-server has to be launched. But what is not clear is how this can be part of the deployment process and a server start-up process to ensure this is running without manual input?
Uncertainty #2: Documentation indicates that sidekiq should be started via
bundle exec sidekiq -q critical -q high -q default -q low
again, what is not clear is how this can be part of the deployment process and a server start-up process to ensure this is running without manual input?
Uncertainty #3: if one of the above two is done improperly it may explain the following behaviour.
After starting sidekiq with the above command (this is assuming 4 levels of priority are needed. In the present context they are not; but I wanted to test and observe behaviour) and through an action activating a job
GenerateCodeJob.perform_later(item, shop)
=> it is found in Sidekiq's queues, under the Queue default and sits there for yonks.
My understanding is that jobs are performed based on server resource availability. But that is clearly not the case.
So what are the priorities and what type of timings are involved?
Or could the set-up be mistaken?
Related
Hi I just launched a rails 4 application which uses nginx as load balancer with thin serving rails on 2 ports. Additionally I use redis as cache which is also getting used by sidekiq.
I was wondering how can I scale up using another machine in order to run two more rails applications there. My idea is just running two more rails applications on another machine but the headache comes with redis since sidekiq is making heavy use of it. My first idea was just to have another redis slave which is just read only on the second machine . But this might be error prone since I have a lot of writes into redis in order to check a worker queue.
The following scenario kind of confuses me. The web app makes a request and triggers sidekiq which performs a long running action, it continuously updates the status in redis. The web client polls the app every second in order to get the status. Now it could be possible that the request gets redirected to the second machine with the redis slave which is not yet updated. So I was wondering how would be the best setup, just using one redis instance taking into account latency or run a redis slave?
You have two machines:
MachineA running thin and sidekiq.
MachineB running thin and sidekiq.
Now you install redis on MachineA and point Sidekiq to MachineA for Redis. Both Sidekiqs will talk to Redis on MachineA. See Using Redis for more detail.
Side note: A redis slave is useful for read-only debugging but isn't useful for scaling Sidekiq.
I am currently working on moving my environment off Heroku and part of my application is runs a clock process that sets off a Sidekiq background job.
As I understand it, Sidekiq is composed of a client, which sends jobs off to be queued into Redis and a server which pulls off requests of the queue and processes them. I am now trying to split out my application into the following containers on Docker:
- Redis container
- Clock container (Using Clockwork gem)
- Worker container
- Web application container (Rails)
However, I am not sure how one is supposed to split up this Sidekiq server and client. Essentially, the clock container needs to be running Sidekiq on it so that the client can send off jobs to the Redis queue every so often. However, the worker containers should also run Sidekiq (the server though) on them so that they can process the jobs. I assume that splitting up the responsibilities between different containers should be quite possible to do since Heroku allows you to split this across various dynos.
I can imagine one way to do this would be to assign the clock container to pull off a non-existent queue so that it just never pulls any jobs off the queue and then set the worker to be pulling off a queue that exists. However, this just doesn't seem like the most optimal approach to me since it will still be checking for new jobs in this non-existing queue.
Any tips or guides on how I can start going about this?
The sidekiq client just publishes jobs into redis. A sidekiq deamon process just subscribes to redis and starts worker threads as they are published.
So you can just install the redis gem on both conatainers: Clock container and Worker Container and start the worker daemon only on the Worker Container and provide a proper redis config to both. You also have to make sure that the worker sourcecode is available on both servers/containers as Sidekiq client just stores the name of the worker class and then the daemon instanciates it through metaprogramming.
But actually you also can just include a sidekiq daemon process together with every application wich needs to process a worker job. Yes, there is this best practise of docker for one container per process, however imho this is not an all or nothing rule. In this case i see both processes as one unity. It's just a way of running some code in background. You then would just configure that instances of same applications just work against same sidekiq queues. Or you could even configure that every physical node runs again a separate queue.
I'm using delayed_job to run jobs, with new jobs being added every minute by a cronjob.
Currently I have an issue where the rake jobs:work task, currently started with 'nohup rake jobs:work &' manually, is randomly exiting.
While God seems to be a solution to some people, the extra memory overhead is rather annoying and I'd prefer a simpler solution that can be restarted by the deployment script (Capistrano).
Is there some bash/Ruby magic to make this happen, or am I destined to run a monitoring service on my server with some horrid hacks to allow the unprivelaged account the site deploys to the ability to restart it?
I'd suggest you to use foreman. It allows you to start any number of jobs in development by using foreman run, and then export your configuration (number of processes per type, limits etc) as upstart scripts, to make them available to Ubuntu's upstart (why invoking God when the operating system already has this for free??).
The configuration file, Procfile, is also exactly the same file Heroku uses for process configuration, so with just one file you get three process management systems covered.
Situation: I am using Rails + Unicorn, deploying with Capistrano. Sometimes Rails app fails to start in production mode (though it is not the real production, but a staging env). This usually happens due to errors in deploy scripts or configuration (thus usually not detectable by tests). When this happens, unicorn master process kills the worker that failed and spawns a new one, which also fails and so on and so forth. During all that time unicorn consumes lots of CPU and pollutes logs with the same message.
Manual way (not good): Go to your home page to see if it works. Look at the htop. Tail the logs. Kill unicorn manually. Cons: easy to forget. Logs are polluted, CPU is loaded while you are reacting.
Another solution: Use unicorn's preload_app true. This will cause master process to fail fast. Cons: higher memory consumption in happy scenario.
Best practice: - ???
Is there any way to cleverly detect that unicorn master uselessly tries to spawn failing children and stop it?
You have something like "unicorn start" in your Capistrano script right? Make your Capistrano script ping Unicorn right after invoking that command. If Unicorn does not return an expected response within a timeout, then you know that something went wrong, and you can choose to rollback the deploy or performing some other action.
As for how to ping Unicorn, that depends. If you have Unicorn listening on a TCP socket then you can use curl. If you have Unicorn listening on a Unix domain socket then you have to write a little script that connects to it, like this:
require 'socket'
sock = UNIXSocket.new('/path-to-unicorn.sock')
sock.write("HEAD / HTTP/1.0\r\n")
sock.write("Host: www.foo.com\r\n")
sock.write("Connection: close\r\n")
sock.write("\r\n")
if sock.read !~ /something/
exit 1
end
But it sounds like Phusion Passenger Enterprise solves your problem beautifully. It has this feature called "deployment error resistance". When you deploy a new version and Phusion Passenger detects that it cannot spawn any processes for your new codebase, it will stop trying to spawn your new version and keep the processes for the old versions around indefinitely, until you manually give the signal that it's okay to spawn processes for the new version. In the mean time it will log all errors into the log file so that you can analyze the problem.
I would suggest brushing off your bash skills. The functionality you need is already in Unicorn as it leverages the Unix-y master/worker process.
You need a init.d script. Or at the very least godrb or monit. I recommend the init.d script route AND monitoring. Its more complex, but it can more easily be leveraged by your monitoring software and also gives you an automatic start on reboot.
The gist of it is:
Send the USR2 signal to the unicorn master process, this will fork the master process.
Then send the WINCH to the old master process that gets created, this will kill each worker.
Then you can send the old master process the QUIT signal.
Unicorn Signals
This will spin up a new master process running the new code and label the old one as (old). If it fails the old one should be returned to its prior state and you shouldn't suffer an outage, just a restart error. This is the beauty of unicorn. You can almost get instantaneous deploys of your code.
I'm using a lot of hedge words because I did this work on my apps over a year ago so there are a lot of cobwebs upstairs. Hope this helps!
This is by no mean a correct script. Its a good starting point though ... feel free to update the gist if you can improve upon it! :-)
Example Unicorn Control Script
My Rails application has a number of tasks which are offloaded into background processes, such as image resizing and uploading to S3. I'm using delayed_job to manage these processes.
These processes, particularly thumbnailing PDFs (using Ghostscript) and resizing images (using ImageMagick), are CPU intensive and often consume 100% CPU time. Since these jobs are running on the same (RedHat Linux) server as the web application itself, as well as the DB, they can lead to our web application being unresponsive.
One solution is to get another server on which to run only the background jobs. I guess this would be the optimal solution? However, since this isn't something I can do immediately I wonder whether it would be possible to somehow make the background jobs run at a lower operating system priority, and hence consume less CPU cycles in doing their work?
Thoughts appreciated.
If I'm not mistaken, delayed_job uses worker processes that will handle all the background jobs. It should be easily possible to alter the OS scheduling priority of the process when you start it.
So instead of, for example:
ruby script/delayed_job -e production -n 2 start
try:
nice -n 15 ruby script/delayed_job -e production -n 2 start