Resque and Sidekiq as of August 2016

Motivation

Some months ago, at an interview I got asked this:

What would you use resque or sidekiq and why?

My answer was something along the lines of:

• Sidekiq consumes less memory, so that sounds better.
• Both Resque and Sidekiq are stable and widely used in production.
• I’ve used Resque in a 3 applications, two of them are still running and processing tons of background jobs.
• Before making my choice I would need to know the kind of background processing that we would do. I want to know if the jobs would be IO bound or CPU bound.

I want this writing to be:

1. A helper to uncover a better answer.
2. A mental model and decision framework to help me make a choice the next time.

What is background processing?

What the internet says about it?

PROs and CONs

How your problem impacts the choice

Mental model and decision frameworks

• https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
• https://mentalmodelsblog.wordpress.com/ http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/about/what-are-mental-models/

TODO

Review:

• https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/pull/2593#issuecomment-150316537
• http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2013/11/linux-process-and-threads/