Question

I have an application in Django, that needs to send a large number of emails to users in various use cases. I don’t want to handle this synchronously within the application for obvious reasons.

Has anyone any recommendations for a message queuing server which integrates well with Python, or they have used on a Django project? The rest of my stack is Apache, mod_python, MySQL.

Answer 1

So far I have found no ‘nice’ solution for this. I have some more strict soft realtime requirements (taking a picture from a cardboard box being labeled) so probably one of the approaches is fast enough for you. I assume emails can wait for a few minutes.

• A ‘todo list’ in the database processed by a cron job.
• A ‘todo list’ in the database processed permanently beeing polled by a daemon.
• Using a custom daemon which gets notified by the webserver via an UDP packet (in Production today). Basically my own Queing system with the IP stack for handling the queue.
• Using ActiveMQ as a message broker – this didn’t work out because of stability issues. Also to me Java Daemons are generally somewhat plump
• Using Update Triggers in CouchDB. Nice but Update Triggers are not meant to do heavy image processing, so no good fit for my problem.

So far I haven’t tried RabbitMQ and XMPP/ejabebrd for handling the problem but they are on my list of next things to try. RabbitMQ got decent Python connectivity during 2008 and there are tons of XMPP libraries.

But perhaps all you need is a correctly configured mailserver on the local machine. This probably would allow you to dump mails synchronously into the local mailserver and thus make your whole software stack much more simple.