Rails parallel background processing

Question

I have a rails application (which acts like some sort of load balancer for a group of printers) that needs to do some background processing. The background processing logic needs to iterate over all available (non busy) printers and send a print job via TCP socket to each one as long as there are jobs present.

I know there are several solutions out there that deal with background processing (Starling / Workling / ActiveMQ, BackgroundRB, Delayed Job and so on), but what would be the best one to suit my needs (i would need one worker / thread for each printer currently available)?

Thanks,

Ryan

Answer 1

DelayedJob is a good and simple solution because it is integrated into your environment and it uses your application database. This is perfect if you don't immediately need to start with a separate environment. In other words, you don't need additional requirements rather than your Rails application and database itself.

Resque is also an other great solution, but it requires you to use Redis database.

I didn't try other solutions because they were too complex or superseded by Redis and DelayedJob.