polling with delayed_job - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a process which takes generally a few seconds to complete so I'm trying to use delayed_job to handle it asynchronously. The job itself works fine, my question is how to go about polling the job to find out if it's done.
I can get an id from delayed_job by simply assigning it to a variable:
job = Available.delay.dosomething(:var => 1234)
+------+----------+----------+------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-------------+
| id | priority | attempts | handler | last_error | run_at | locked_at | failed_at | locked_by | created_at | updated_at |
+------+----------+----------+------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-------------+
| 4037 | 0 | 0 | --- !ru... | | 2011-04-... | | | | 2011-04... | 2011-04-... |
+------+----------+----------+------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-------------+
But as soon as it completes the job it deletes it and searching for the completed record returns an error:
#job=Delayed::Job.find(4037)
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound: Couldn't find Delayed::Backend::ActiveRecord::Job with ID=4037
#job= Delayed::Job.exists?(params[:id])
Should I bother to change this, and maybe postpone the deletion of complete records? I'm not sure how else I can get a notification of it's status. Or is polling a dead record as proof of completion ok? Anyone else face something similar?

Answer 1

Let's start with the API. I'd like to have something like the following.
#available.working? # => true or false, so we know it's running
#available.finished? # => true or false, so we know it's finished (already ran)
Now let's write the job.
class AwesomeJob < Struct.new(:options)
def perform
do_something_with(options[:var])
end
end
So far so good. We have a job. Now let's write logic that enqueues it. Since Available is the model responsible for this job, let's teach it how to start this job.
class Available < ActiveRecord::Base
def start_working!
Delayed::Job.enqueue(AwesomeJob.new(options))
end
def working?
# not sure what to put here yet
end
def finished?
# not sure what to put here yet
end
end
So how do we know if the job is working or not? There are a few ways, but in rails it just feels right that when my model creates something, it's usually associated with that something. How do we associate? Using ids in database. Let's add a job_id on Available model.
While we're at it, how do we know that the job is not working because it already finished, or because it didn't start yet? One way is to actually check for what the job actually did. If it created a file, check if file exists. If it computed a value, check that result is written. Some jobs are not as easy to check though, since there may be no clear verifiable result of their work. For such case, you can use a flag or a timestamp in your model. Assuming this is our case, let's add a job_finished_at timestamp to distinguish a not yet ran job from an already finished one.
class AddJobIdToAvailable < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
add_column :available, :job_id, :integer
add_column :available, :job_finished_at, :datetime
end
def self.down
remove_column :available, :job_id
remove_column :available, :job_finished_at
end
end
Alright. So now let's actually associate Available with its job as soon as we enqueue the job, by modifying the start_working! method.
def start_working!
job = Delayed::Job.enqueue(AwesomeJob.new(options))
update_attribute(:job_id, job.id)
end
Great. At this point I could've written belongs_to :job, but we don't really need that.
So now we know how to write the working? method, so easy.
def working?
job_id.present?
end
But how do we mark the job finished? Nobody knows a job has finished better than the job itself. So let's pass available_id into the job (as one of the options) and use it in the job. For that we need to modify the start_working! method to pass the id.
def start_working!
job = Delayed::Job.enqueue(AwesomeJob.new(options.merge(:available_id => id))
update_attribute(:job_id, job.id)
end
And we should add the logic into the job to update our job_finished_at timestamp when it's done.
class AwesomeJob < Struct.new(:options)
def perform
available = Available.find(options[:available_id])
do_something_with(options[:var])
# Depending on whether you consider an error'ed job to be finished
# you may want to put this under an ensure. This way the job
# will be deemed finished even if it error'ed out.
available.update_attribute(:job_finished_at, Time.current)
end
end
With this code in place we know how to write our finished? method.
def finished?
job_finished_at.present?
end
And we're done. Now we can simply poll against #available.working? and #available.finished? Also, you gain the convenience of knowing which exact job was created for your Available by checking #available.job_id. You can easily turn it into a real association by saying belongs_to :job.

Answer 2

I ended up using a combination of Delayed_Job with an after(job) callback which populates a memcached object with the same ID as the job created. This way I minimize the number of times I hit the database asking for the status of the job, instead polling the memcached object. And it contains the entire object I need from the completed job, so I don't even have a roundtrip request. I got the idea from an article by the github guys who did pretty much the same thing.
https://github.com/blog/467-smart-js-polling
and used a jquery plugin for the polling, which polls less frequently, and gives up after a certain number of retries
https://github.com/jeremyw/jquery-smart-poll
Seems to work great.
def after(job)
prices = Room.prices.where("space_id = ? AND bookdate BETWEEN ? AND ?", space_id.to_i, date_from, date_to).to_a
Rails.cache.fetch(job.id) do
bed = Bed.new(:space_id => space_id, :date_from => date_from, :date_to => date_to, :prices => prices)
end
end

Answer 3

I think that the best way would be to use the callbacks available in the delayed_job.
These are:
:success, :error and :after.
so you can put some code in your model with the after:
class ToBeDelayed
def perform
# do something
end
def after(job)
# do something
end
end
Because if you insist of using the obj.delayed.method, then you'll have to monkey patch Delayed::PerformableMethod and add the after method there.
IMHO it's far better than polling for some value which might be even backend specific (ActiveRecord vs. Mongoid, for instance).

Answer 4

The simplest method of accomplishing this is to change your polling action to be something similar to the following:
def poll
#job = Delayed::Job.find_by_id(params[:job_id])
if #job.nil?
# The job has completed and is no longer in the database.
else
if #job.last_error.nil?
# The job is still in the queue and has not been run.
else
# The job has encountered an error.
end
end
end
Why does this work? When Delayed::Job runs a job from the queue, it deletes it from the database if successful. If the job fails, the record stays in the queue to be ran again later, and the last_error attribute is set to the encountered error. Using the two pieces of functionality above, you can check for deleted records to see if they were successful.
The benefits to the method above are:
You get the polling effect that you were looking for in your original post
Using a simple logic branch, you can provide feedback to the user if there is an error in processing the job
You can encapsulate this functionality in a model method by doing something like the following:
# Include this in your initializers somewhere
class Queue < Delayed::Job
def self.status(id)
self.find_by_id(id).nil? ? "success" : (job.last_error.nil? ? "queued" : "failure")
end
end
# Use this method in your poll method like so:
def poll
status = Queue.status(params[:id])
if status == "success"
# Success, notify the user!
elsif status == "failure"
# Failure, notify the user!
end
end

Answer 5

I'd suggest that if it's important to get notification that the job has completed, then write a custom job object and queue that rather than relying upon the default job that gets queued when you call Available.delay.dosomething. Create an object something like:
class DoSomethingAvailableJob
attr_accessor options
def initialize(options = {})
#options = options
end
def perform
Available.dosomething(#options)
# Do some sort of notification here
# ...
end
end
and enqueue it with:
Delayed::Job.enqueue DoSomethingAvailableJob.new(:var => 1234)

Answer 6

The delayed_jobs table in your application is intended to provide the status of running and queued jobs only. It isn't a persistent table, and really should be as small as possible for performance reasons. Thats why the jobs are deleted immediately after completion.
Instead you should add field to your Available model that signifies that the job is done. Since I'm usually interested in how long the job takes to process, I add start_time and end_time fields. Then my dosomething method would look something like this:
def self.dosomething(model_id)
model = Model.find(model_id)
begin
model.start!
# do some long work ...
rescue Exception => e
# ...
ensure
model.finish!
end
end
The start! and finish! methods just record the current time and save the model. Then I would have a completed? method that your AJAX can poll to see if the job is finished.
def completed?
return true if start_time and end_time
return false
end
There are many ways to do this but I find this method simple and works well for me.