Advanced Options

The Sidekiq Configuration File

The Sidekiq configuration file is a YAML file that Sidekiq server uses to configure itself, by default located at config/sidekiq.yml. It is only necessary to create the file if you need to set advanced options, such as concurrency pool size, named queues, PID file location, etc. Here is an example configuration file:

---
:concurrency: 5
staging:
  :concurrency: 10
production:
  :concurrency: 10
:queues:
  - critical
  - default
  - low

Note the use of environment-specific subsections. These values will override top-level values. If you don't use the default location, use the -C flag to tell Sidekiq where the file is:

sidekiq -C config/myapp_sidekiq.yml

Options passed on the command line will also override options specified in the config file.

Queues

By default, sidekiq uses a single queue called "default" in Redis. If you want to use multiple queues, you can either specify them as arguments to the sidekiq command, or set them in the Sidekiq configuration file. Each queue can be configured with an optional weight. A queue with a weight of 2 will be checked twice as often as a queue with a weight of 1:

As arguments...

sidekiq -q critical,2 -q default

In the configuration file...

# ...
:queues:
  - [critical, 2]
  - default

If you want queues always processed in a specific order, just declare them in order without weights:

As arguments...

sidekiq -q critical -q default -q low

In the configuration file...

# ...
:queues:
  - critical
  - default
  - low

This means that any job in the default queue will be processed only when the critical queue is empty.

You can get random queue priorities by declaring each queue with a weight of 1, so each queue has an equal chance of being processed:

# ...
:queues:
  - ["foo", 1]
  - ["bar", 1]
  - ["xyzzy", 1]

You can specify a queue to use for a given worker by declaring it:

class ImportantWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker
  sidekiq_options queue: 'critical'

  def perform(*important_args)
    puts "Doing critical work"
  end
end

Note: Sidekiq does not support mixing ordered and weighted queue modes. If, for example, you need a critical queue that is processed first, and would like other queues to be weighted, you would dedicate a Sidekiq process exclusively to the critical queue, and other Sidekiq processes to service the rest of the queues.

I don't recommend having more than a handful of queues per Sidekiq process. Having lots of queues means you should start grouping Sidekiq processes into roles (e.g. image_worker, email_worker, etc) or simplify your queue setup. Lots of queues makes for a more complex system and Sidekiq Pro cannot reliably handle multiple queues without polling. M Sidekiq Pro processes polling N queues means O(M*N) operations per second slamming Redis.

If you use the sidekiq web interface, newly added queues will first appear there when a job has been enqueued for this queue.

Reserved Queues

If you'd like to "reserve" a queue so it only handles certain jobs, the easiest way is to run two sidekiq processes, each handling different queues:

sidekiq -q critical # Only handles jobs on the "critical" queue
sidekiq -q default -q low -q critical # Handles critical jobs only after checking for other jobs

Workers

Sidekiq offers a number of options for controlling worker behavior.

• queue: use a named queue for this Worker, default default
• retry: enable retries for this Worker, default true. Alternatively, you can specify the max number of times a job is retried (ie. retry: 3)
• dead: whether a failing job should go to the Dead queue if it fails retries, default: true
• backtrace: whether to save any error backtrace in the retry payload to display in web UI, can be true, false or an integer number of lines to save, default false. Be careful, backtraces are big and can take up a lot of space in Redis if you have a large number of retries. You should be using an error service like Honeybadger.
• pool: use the given Redis connection pool to push this type of job to a given shard.
• tags: add an Array of tags to each job. You can filter by tag within the Web UI.

These are the options that are supported out of the box.

class HardWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker
  sidekiq_options queue: :crawler, tags: ['alpha', '🥇']
  
  def perform(name, count)
  end
end

Default options for all workers can be set using Sidekiq.default_worker_options=:

Sidekiq.default_worker_options = { 'backtrace' => true }

Options can also be overridden per call:

HardWorker.set(queue: :critical).perform_async(name, count)

Concurrency

You can tune the amount of concurrency in your Sidekiq process. By default, one sidekiq process creates 10 threads. If that's crushing your machine with I/O, you can adjust it down:

bundle exec sidekiq -c 5
RAILS_MAX_THREADS=3 bundle exec sidekiq

I don't recommend setting concurrency higher than 50. Starting in Rails 5, RAILS_MAX_THREADS can be used to configure Rails and Sidekiq concurrency. Note that ActiveRecord has a connection pool which needs to be properly configured in config/database.yml to work well with heavy concurrency. Set pool equal to the number of threads:

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  database: foo_production
  pool: <%= ENV['RAILS_MAX_THREADS'] || 10 %>

Connection Pooling

Sidekiq includes the connection_pool gem which your Workers can use. With a connection pool, you can share a limited number of I/O connections among a larger number of threads.

class HardWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  MEMCACHED_POOL = ConnectionPool.new(size: 10, timeout: 3) { Dalli::Client.new }
  def perform(args)
    MEMCACHED_POOL.with do |dalli|
      dalli.set('foo', 'bar')
    end
  end
end

This ensures that even if you have lots of concurrency, you'll only have 10 connections open to memcached per Sidekiq process.

Environment

Sidekiq allows you to use -e production, RAILS_ENV=production or APP_ENV=production to control the current environment. APP_ENV is nice because the name is not tech-specific (unlike RAILS_ENV or RACK_ENV).

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