Simple Worker Thread Queue

Provides an simply in-memory queue that manages the processing of jobs. Jobs are processed asychronously with Node.js Worker Threads.

Queue behavior is as follows:

• Queue exists only in-memory, not persisted
• Jobs begin processing immediately when added
• Jobs are processed sequentially one at a time, unless the CONCURRENT_WORKER_THREADS configuration in a .env file is greater than 1
• Optional completion callbacks can be provided to Jobs or Batches to track processing completion

Install

To install as a dependency in your project:

npm install simple-worker-thread-queue

Use

Typescript examples are available in ./examples/typescript, but the basic steps are:

1. Define a custom Job processing function in a seperate file and export it as processJob.

// CustomWorker.js
export async function processJob (jobOptions, job) {
  const result = {
    message: `Hello ${jobOptions.name}`,
  };
  // result will be saved to the job data
  return result;
};

2. Create a Queue in your project file and pass the absolute path to the file exporting processJob.

import { Queue } from 'simple-worker-thread-queue';

const queue = new Queue({
  processJobExportPath: path.join(__dirname, './CustomWorker.js')
});

3. Add a Job to the Queue. Monitor Job completion with a completionCallback function.

const completionCallback = async (completedJob) => {
  console.log(`job ${completedJob.getId()} completed with result: ${completedJob.getData().message}`);
};

const jobOptions = {
  name: 'Taylor',
  completionCallback,
};

const job = queue.add(jobOptions);

Batches

Jobs can be grouped together into a Batch. By supplying a batch completion callback function, consuming services can be nofitied when the processing of the batched jobs is complete.

import { Batch } from 'simple-worker-thread-queue';

const completionCallback = async function (completedBatch) {
  console.log(`batch ${completedBatch.getId()} completed with ${completedBatch.getJobs().length} jobs`);
}
const batch = new Batch(completionCallback);

// add jobs to queue with batch parameter
const job1 = queue.addToBatch(job1Options, batch);
const job2 = queue.addToBatch(job2Options, batch);

Inspiration

When AWS announced it would be discontinuing support for their Elastic Transcoder service, I created a small REST-based service to replace it. As part of this service I needed simple job queuing, with job processing offloaded so the main thread could handle further REST requests.

Existing queuing solutions like BullMQ were feature rich but overkill. I spun the queueing code I created off as a seperate npm package incase it could be used else-where.