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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T23:30:32+00:00

My environment is rails 3.1, heroku bamboo stack, delayed_job_active_record, (https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job ) and experimenting with

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My environment is rails 3.1, heroku bamboo stack, delayed_job_active_record, (https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job ) and experimenting with hirefire. (https://github.com/meskyanichi/hirefire) – I can see the delayed_job queue documentation, but how do I apply this on heroku?

I have a max priority set of tasks that get spawned off every hour that I need to dedicate 3 workers to, it takes approx 26 minutes to complete. During that time, less important background tasks need to continue, with perhaps 1 worker dedicated to them.

So I’ll set that block of priority tasks to being in a named queue, e.g. ‘hourtask’, and then name a queue for everything else ‘everythingelse’ 🙂

The question is, how do I dedicate heroku workers to specific queues? Is it something to do with the environment variables as per the documentation? It says:

# Set the --queue or --queues option to work from a particular queue.
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job --queue=tracking start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job --queues=mailers,tasks start

But I’m not familiar enough with heroku setup to work out how to apply this to my heroku production environment?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s in the README for Delayed Job 3:

    DJ 3 introduces Resque-style named queues while still retaining DJ-style priority. The goal is to provide a system for grouping tasks to be worked by separate pools of workers, which may be scaled and controlled individually.

    Jobs can be assigned to a queue by setting the queue option:

    object.delay(:queue => 'tracking').method

Delayed::Job.enqueue job, :queue => 'tracking'

handle_asynchronously :tweet_later, :queue => 'tweets'

    script/delayed_job can be used to manage a background process which will start working off jobs.

    To do so, add gem “daemons” to your Gemfile and make sure you’ve run rails generate delayed_job.

    You can then do the following:

    $ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job stop

# Runs two workers in separate processes.
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job -n 2 start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job stop

# Set the --queue or --queues option to work from a particular queue.
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job --queue=tracking start
$ RAILS_ENV=production script/delayed_job --queues=mailers,tasks start

    Work off queues by setting the QUEUE or QUEUES environment variable.

    QUEUE=tracking rake jobs:work
QUEUES=mailers,tasks rake jobs:work

    On Heroku, In your procfile, create two entries:

    worker1: QUEUE=tracking rake jobs:work
worker2: QUEUES=mailers,tasks rake jobs:work

    and scale them individually:

    heroku ps:scale worker1=2 worker2=1

    etc

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