♠ ace hacker's Profile

Ah yes. Oracle.... Oracle certainly has these features and more. However, I typically exclude Oracle from comparisons when talking about Ruby related programming. Oracle has so many features but they are out of reach for simple projects that exist in a non-enterprise environment.

PostgreSQL specific features used include: SELECT FOR UPDATE NOWAIT and LISTEN/NOTIFY. Take a look at the PL/pgSQL function that is called to lock a job. https://github.com/ryandotsmith/queue_classic/blob/master/sql/ddl.sql

While I admit that QC does not have all of the features that delayed jobs boasts, I would also admit that it does not have all of the shortcomings as well. QC takes job locking quite serious and has proven to be more robust in high-volume scenarios. For instance, take a look at the PL/pgSQL functions that queue_classic uses to lock a job. All of the code in that function is tuned to ensure quick access to jobs while guaranteeing that no two workers can lock the same job. While the chance that delayed job will allow multiple workers to lock the same chance is low, it will happen eventually --especially in production environments that churn through tens of millions of jobs per day

Also, as Ryan Bates mentioned, queue_classic is not dependent on active_record. This means a whole lot when you want to write simple ruby programs that utilize a message queue.

Finally, we use queue_classic at Heroku because we have production systems that have daily message throughput in the tens of millions. We needed a queuing system that was reliable and easy to reason about; queue_classic satisfied both of these conditions.

Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions on how queue_classic might be able to help you out. @ryandotsmith or ryan@heroku.com