Creeper

Can be used as an in place drop in for stalker but it is multi threaded so you can easily do more without using more memory

Creeper - an improvement on Stalker

The big difference is how you "work" jobs

all you need is a thread count arguement :)

Creeper.work(<jobs>, <thread_count>)

Beanstalkd is a fast, lightweight queueing backend inspired by mmemcached.

Queueing jobs

From anywhere in your app:

require 'creeper'

Creeper.enqueue('email.send', :to => 'joe@example.com')
Creeper.enqueue('post.cleanup.all')
Creeper.enqueue('post.cleanup', :id => post.id)

Working jobs

In a standalone file, typically jobs.rb or worker.rb:

require 'creeper'
include Creeper

job 'email.send' do |args|
  Pony.send(:to => args['to'], :subject => "Hello there")
end

job 'post.cleanup.all' do |args|
  Post.all.each do |post|
    enqueue('post.cleanup', :id => post.id)
  end
end

job 'post.cleanup' do |args|
  Post.find(args['id']).cleanup
end

Creeper.work(<jobs>, <thread_count>)

Running

First, make sure you have Beanstalkd installed and running:

$ sudo brew install beanstalkd
$ beanstalkd

Creeper:

$ sudo gem install creeper

Error Handling

If you include an error block in your jobs definition, that block will be invoked when a worker encounters an error. You might use this to report errors to an external monitoring service:

error do |e, job, args|
  Exceptional.handle(e)
end

Before filter

If you wish to run a block of code prior to any job:

before do |job|
  puts "About to work #{job}"
end