Mastering Using SolidQueue in Ruby on Rails Learn How to use SolidQueue in your Ruby on Rails Web Applications Written by Chetan Mittal Edition: Beta. This Book Is Available To Subscribed Members Only. Subscribe Now!

Open Understanding Background Processing and Its Importance

In the world of web applications, not everything should be done in real time.

Imagine a user submits a form that sends a welcome email, updates a CRM, and posts data to a third-party service. If all of that happens synchronously—right as the form is submitted—the user has to wait for every one of those tasks to finish.

That means long response times, bad user experience, and potentially, timeouts.

That’s where background job processing comes in. It allows developers to move such time-consuming operations out of the request-response cycle, making the application more responsive and resilient.

With background jobs, we get performance, reliability, and the ability to scale the application better without burning out the main application thread.

Rails has long recognized this need, and over the years, the ecosystem around background jobs has evolved significantly. But Rails is not

Open Background Job Processing Across Other Web Application Development Frameworks

Background Job Processing Across Other Different Tech Stacks

While Ruby on Rails offers tools like Delayed Job, Sidekiq, and now SolidQueue, it’s far from the only ecosystem that deals with background jobs.

Every modern web framework must handle asynchronous processing to manage performance and scalability.

However, each language ecosystem has evolved its own way of doing it—shaped by community preferences, architectural styles, and tooling.

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Python: Celery and RQ

In the Python world, the most widely used background job processor is Celery.

Celery is robust, feature-rich, and works well with popular frameworks like Django and Flask. It uses message brokers like Redis or RabbitMQ to manage queues. Here’s how a simple Celery task looks:

#tasks.py
from celery import Celery

app = Celery('tasks', broker='redis://localhost:6379/0')

@app.task
def add(x, y):
    return x + y

You’d then call this from your application like:

Open The Evolution of Background Processing from Rails Beta to Rails 8

The Evolution of Background Processing from Rails Beta to Rails 8

Background processing in Ruby on Rails has come a long way since the early days of the framework.

In the initial versions—Rails 0.x and 1.x—there was no native concept of background jobs.

Developers often hacked around long-running tasks using cron jobs, shell scripts, or external daemons.

There were no conventions or standardized interfaces, and each project implemented its own system for deferred execution.

This made background work brittle and hard to maintain. If a task failed, there was no built-in retry logic, visibility, or consistency across projects.

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As Rails matured, the first real attempt at standardized background job processing came with Delayed Job, extracted from Shopify’s codebase around 2008.

Delayed Job was simple and clever—it used the database itself as a queue.

Jobs were just rows in a delayed_jobs table, serialized as YAML. A background worker process qu

Open Sidekiq and Redis: Their Role in Rails Background Processing Until Version 7

Sidekiq and Redis: Their Role in Rails Background Processing Until Version 7

Before SolidQueue arrived with Rails 8, the de facto standard for production-grade background job processing in the Rails ecosystem was Sidekiq.

Introduced in 2012, Sidekiq radically improved how background jobs were handled by bringing multithreaded job execution and Redis-backed queuing to the Ruby world.

While Rails developers had already been using tools like Delayed Job and Resque, Sidekiq's performance, simplicity, and powerful feature set quickly made it the default choice for anything beyond small-scale or development setups.

Sidekiq works by pushing jobs into Redis lists, where background workers poll these queues, retrieve the job data, and execute the defined Ruby classes. Redis acts as an in-memory data store, which makes it fast and ideal for queueing workloads.

A key advantage was Sidekiq’s ability to execute multiple jobs concurrently using threads, lev

Open Why SolidQueue? The Need for a Native Rails Job Processing Solution

Why SolidQueue? The Need for a Native Rails Job Processing Solution

As background job processing became an integral part of almost every modern Rails application—from sending emails and notifications to syncing third-party APIs and running scheduled maintenance tasks—the Rails ecosystem increasingly relied on third-party tools to handle this critical responsibility.

While tools like Sidekiq, Resque, and Delayed Job each had their strengths, they also introduced external complexity, operational overhead, and a disconnect from the core Rails philosophy of convention over configuration.

SolidQueue was born out of this realization—a need for a first-class, native queuing system that would work seamlessly within the Rails framework, without the burden of managing an external data store like Redis or adopting the learning curve of third-party job processing libraries.

Rails had standardized background job interfaces through Active Job back in version 4, but up

Understanding SolidQueue

SolidQueue vs Sidekiq

Installing and Setting Up SolidQueue in a Fresh Rails 8 App

SolidQueue in the Real World: Common Patterns and Best Practices

Open Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is SolidQueue, and why was it introduced in Rails 8?

SolidQueue is a background job processing system introduced in Rails 8, designed to operate entirely using the application's database. It was developed to reduce operational overhead by eliminating the need for external dependencies like Redis, which are required by other job processors such as Sidekiq and Resque. This aligns with the Rails philosophy of convention over configuration and simplifies deployment, especially when using SQLite as the default database in production.

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2. How does SolidQueue differ from other background job systems like Sidekiq or Resque?

Unlike Sidekiq and Resque, which depend on Redis for job queuing and processing, SolidQueue operates solely on the application's database (e.g., SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL). This approach removes the need for additional infrastructure, making it easier to set up and maintain. SolidQueue is tightly integrated with Active Job, ensuring a

Introducing SolidQueue's Architecture

How SolidQueue Works Internally?

Workers, Queues, and Jobs Explained

How SolidQueue Integrates with ActiveJob?

Why SolidQueue uses Database?

Overview

Controlling Queue Behavior and Job Priorities

Running Jobs Synchronously vs. Asynchronously

Handling Job Errors, Retries, and Dead Jobs

Advanced Execution Patterns: Delays, Recurring Jobs, and Bulk Enqueueing

Job Scheduling and Delayed Execution

Parallel Processing and Concurrency Management

Managing Long-Running Jobs Efficiently

Customizing Worker Pools and Scaling Jobs

Viewing and Managing Jobs via Rails Console

Logging and Debugging SolidQueue Jobs

Using Admin Interfaces for Job Monitoring

Integrating SolidQueue with Third-Party Monitoring Tools