Fairway - a fair way to queue messages in multi-user systems

Installation

Install the gem:

gem install fairway

Then make sure you bundle install.

Configuration

Fairway.configure do |config|
  config.redis     = { host: "localhost", port: 6379 }
  config.namespace = "fairway"

  config.facet do |message|
    message[:user]
  end

  config.register_queue("all_messages")
end

What's a facet?

In many queuing systems, if a single user manages to queue up a lot of messages/jobs at once, everyone else in the system has to wait. Facets are a way of splitting up a single queue by user (or any other criteria) to ensure fair processing of each facet's jobs.

When pulling off a faceted queue, facets are processed in a round-robin fashion, so you'll pull off one message for each facet which contains messages before doubling back and pulling additional messages from a given facet.

You can define how to facet your messages during configuration:

Fairway.configure do |config|
  config.facet do |message|
    message[:user]
  end
end

Now, any message delivered by fairway, will use the user key of the message to determine which facet to use.

You could also just have a queue for each user, but at scale, this can get crazy and many queuing systems don't perform well with thousands of queues.

Queuing messages

In order to queue messages, you need to register a queue. You can register multiple queues, and each queue will receive delivered messages.

Registering a queue is part of your fairway configuration:

Fairway.configure do |config|
  config.register_queue("myqueue")
  config.register_queue("yourqueue")
end

After configuring your queues, just create a fairway connection, and it'll handle persisting your queues in Redis:

connection = Fairway::Connection.new

Delivering messages

To add messages to your queues, you deliver them:

connection = Fairway::Connection.new
connection.deliver(
  type: "invite_friends",
  user: "bob",
  friends: ["nancy", "john"]
)

Now, any registered queues will receive this message, faceted if you've defined a facet in your configuration.

Consuming messages from a queue

Once you have messages on a queue, you can pull them off and process them:

connection = Fairway::Connection.new
queue      = Fairway::Queue.new(connection, "myqueue")
message    = queue.pull

Behind the scenes, fairway uses a round-robin strategy to ensure equal weighting of any facets which contain messages.

If there are no messages in any facets, queue.pull will return nil.

Channeling messages

In many cases, you don't want all messages delivered to every queue. You'd like to filter which messages a queue receives.

You can accomplish this with message channels. By default, all messages use the default channel. You can customize this by creating a Fairway::ChanneledConnection and a block which defines the channel for a given message:

conn = Fairway::Connection.new
conn = Fairway::ChanneledConnection.new(conn) do |message|
  message[:type]
end

You can also register queues for a channel:

Fairway.configure do |config|
  config.register_queue("invite_queue", "invite_friends")
end

Now, your queue will only receive messages which have the channel invite_friends.

If you'd like to receive messages with channels that match a pattern:

Fairway.configure do |config|
  config.register_queue("all_invites", "invite_.*")
end

Now, messages from the channels invite_friends, invite_pets, invite_parents will be delivered to the invite_queue.

conn.deliver(
  type: "invite_friends",
  user: "bob",
  friends: ["nancy", "john"]
)
conn.deliver(
  type: "invite_family",
  user: "bob",
  family: ["mom", "pop"]
)
conn.deliver(
  type: "send_invitation",
  user: "bob",
  recipients: ["nancy@example.com", "john@example.com"]
)

Subscribing to messages

To listen for messages without the overhead of queuing them, you can subscribe:

connection = Fairway::Connection.new

connection.subscribe do |message|
  # Do something with each message
end

If you'd like to only receive some messages, you can subscribe to just a particular channel:

connection = Fairway::Connection.new

connection.subscribe("invite_*") do |message|
  # Do something with each message which
  # has a channel matching "invite_*"
end

Fairway and Sidekiq

Fairway isn't meant to be a robust system for processing queued messages/jobs. To more reliably process queued messages, we've integrated with Sidekiq.

require 'fairway/sidekiq'

connection = Fairway::Connection.new
queues     = Fairway::Queue.new(connection, "myqueue", "yourqueue")

Sidekiq.options[:fetch] = Fairway::Sidekiq::Fetch.new do |fetch|
  fetch.from :sidekiq, 2
  fetch.from queues, 1 do |queue, message|
    # translate message to normalized Sidekiq job, if needed
    { "queue" => "fairway",
      "class" => "FairwayMessageJob",
      "args"  => [message],
      "retry" => true }
  end
end

fetch.from :sidekiq, 2 will fetch from sidekiq queues you have defined through the normal sidekiq configuration.

fetch.from queues, 1 will pull messages from your fairway queue, and allow you to translate them into standard sidekiq jobs.

The second parameters are fetch weights, so in the above example, we'll look for jobs first from your normal sidekiq queues twice as often as your fairway queues.

Queue structure

TODO: low level description of what's going on? performance?

LUA scripting

Fairway uses LUA scripting heavily. This is for a few reasons:

• There is complex logic that can't be expressed in normal redis commands.
• Each script contains many redis commands and it's important that these commands are processed atomically.
• Since the script is run inside of redis, once the script has started, there's very low latency for each redis command. So, the script executes much faster than if we made each call independantly over the network.

This means your must be using a Redis version >= 2.6.0