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Resque VS ZeroMQ

Compare Resque VS ZeroMQ and see what are their differences

Resque logo Resque

Resque is a Redis-backed Ruby library for creating background jobs, placing them on multiple queues, and processing them later.

ZeroMQ logo ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library.
  • Resque Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-04
  • ZeroMQ Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-01

Resque features and specs

  • Simplicity
    Resque is known for its straightforward design and simplicity, making it easy to integrate into existing projects and understand its mechanics, which is beneficial for small to medium-sized applications.
  • Language Support
    While Resque is originally designed for Ruby, it has implementations in various languages such as Python and PHP, allowing cross-language usage and flexibility for developers who might not be working in Ruby.
  • Reliability
    Built on top of Redis, Resque benefits from Redis' durability for storing and managing job queues, making it a reliable choice for job queue management.
  • Background Processing
    It facilitates background processing of jobs, which helps in scaling applications by offloading long-running processes from the main web servers.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Resque has a strong, active community and a broad ecosystem of plugins and extensions, which can help in extending its functionality and maintaining the package.

Possible disadvantages of Resque

  • Dependency on Redis
    Resque requires Redis as a backend, which means it can be a limiting factor if a project needs to minimize dependencies or avoid Redis for specific architectural reasons.
  • Concurrency Limitations
    It is single-threaded and may not be as efficient at handling high concurrency workloads or executing jobs in parallel compared to some other background processing tools.
  • Limited Features
    Resque offers less in-built functionality compared to other job processing systems such as Sidekiq, which includes advanced features like job prioritization, scheduling, and more robust error handling.
  • Monitoring and Management
    While there are web-based monitoring tools for Resque, they may not be as comprehensive or user-friendly as those available for similar tools, potentially complicating tracking and managing jobs at scale.
  • Lack of Official Support for Job Scheduling
    Unlike some other background job systems, out-of-the-box, Resque does not offer official support for scheduled or recurring jobs, which requires additional setups or plugins to achieve.

ZeroMQ features and specs

  • High Performance
    ZeroMQ is designed for high-throughput and low-latency messaging, making it ideal for situations where performance is critical.
  • Scalability
    ZeroMQ supports a variety of communication patterns (e.g., request-reply, publish-subscribe) and can easily scale from a single process to a distributed system across multiple machines.
  • Cross-Platform Support
    ZeroMQ is available on a wide range of platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS, as well as various programming languages (e.g., C, C++, Python, Java).
  • Ease of Use
    With its high-level API, ZeroMQ simplifies complex messaging tasks, allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than low-level networking code.
  • Asynchronous I/O
    ZeroMQ natively supports asynchronous I/O operations, enabling more efficient use of system resources and better overall performance.
  • Fault Tolerance
    ZeroMQ can be configured to automatically reconnect and recover from network failures, which increases system robustness and durability.

Possible disadvantages of ZeroMQ

  • Lack of Built-In Security
    ZeroMQ does not include built-in security features such as encryption or authentication. Developers have to implement these features manually if needed.
  • Complex Configuration
    For advanced use cases, configuring ZeroMQ can become complex and may require a deep understanding of its various options and settings.
  • No Message Persistence
    ZeroMQ does not natively support message persistence. If messages need to be stored and retrieved later, additional mechanisms must be implemented.
  • Learning Curve
    While the high-level API is user-friendly, mastering all of ZeroMQ's features and communication patterns may require a significant investment in time and learning.
  • Limited Built-In Monitoring
    ZeroMQ has minimal built-in tools for monitoring and debugging, which can make it challenging to diagnose and troubleshoot issues in complex deployments.
  • Community Support
    While ZeroMQ has an active community, the level of support and documentation may not be as extensive or comprehensive as that of some other messaging systems.

Analysis of ZeroMQ

Overall verdict

  • ZeroMQ is considered a good choice for developers needing a fast and flexible messaging library, especially in scenarios that demand high throughput and low latency. However, its lack of a built-in persistence mechanism and more advanced messaging features like message routing can be a limitation depending on the use case.

Why this product is good

  • ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library aimed at use in scalable, distributed, or concurrent applications. It's known for its speed and flexibility, allowing for messages to be queued in various patterns such as fan-out, publish-subscribe, and request-reply. It supports multiple transport protocols like TCP, PGM, and IPC, and can be integrated with many different programming languages, which adds to its versatility. Additionally, ZeroMQ is decentralized and doesn't require a dedicated message broker, making it a lightweight and efficient choice for many applications.

Recommended for

  • Developers building distributed systems
  • Applications requiring low-latency and high-throughput messaging
  • Projects where lightweight and decentralized messaging is important
  • Systems that benefit from flexible communication patterns and multiple transport protocols

Resque videos

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ZeroMQ videos

Pieter Hintjens - Distribution, Scale and Flexibility with ZeroMQ

More videos:

  • Review - DragonOS LTS Review srsLTE ZeroMQ, tetra, IMSI catcher, irdium toolkit, and modmobmap (rtlsdr)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Resque and ZeroMQ)
Data Integration
35 35%
65% 65
Stream Processing
34 34%
66% 66
Web Service Automation
31 31%
69% 69
Ruby On Rails
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ZeroMQ should be more popular than Resque. It has been mentiond 39 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Resque mentions (9)

  • What are some popular background job processing libraries for Rails (e.g., Sidekiq, Delayed Job)?
    Resque relies on Redis for job queue management and is known for its scalability and efficiency. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • story of upgrading rails 5.x to 7.x
    We split the staging server into two instances using Ubuntu 22.04 as the base image. The first instance is for a web server with nginx,  passenger and MySQL. The second instance is for the support server and this is where we install redis, memcache, mongodb and resque. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • It’s Time For Active Job
    It is hard to imagine any big and complex Rails project without background jobs processing. There are many gems for this task: **Delayed Job, Sidekiq, Resque, SuckerPunch** and more. And Active Job has arrived here to rule them all. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • How to Setup a Project That Can Host Up to 1000 Users for Free
    Rollbar is a great error-tracking service. It alerts us on exceptions and errors, provides analysis tools and dashboard, so we can see, reproduce, and fix bugs quickly when something went wrong. This service has a possibility to log not only uncaught exceptions but any messages. By default, the messages are reported synchronously, but you can enable asynchronous reporting using Sidekiq, girl_friday, or Resque.... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Add web scraping data into the database at regular intervals [ruby & ror]
    You can use a background job queue like Resque to scrape and process data in the background, and a scheduler like resque-scheduler to schedule jobs to run your scraper periodically. Source: almost 3 years ago
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ZeroMQ mentions (39)

  • C# Image Resizer Using ZeroMQ
    The ImageProcessor in the repository has been implemented in C# using ZeroMQ and the NetMq nuget package. It also uses SixLabors.ImageSharp to resize the image. It consists of. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Messaging in distributed systems using ZeroMQ
    Open a new terminal connection and run the following commands (one after the other). The last command installs ZeroMQ. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • DIY Smart Doorbell for just $2, no soldering required
    Interesting. They seem to warn against using the server for much as it's resource hungry and potentially unreliable, but that appears to be focused on the task of serving data; a simple webhook type use should be safer. It'd be pretty amazing if ESPHome supported something like ZeroMQ[0], so you could talk between nodes in anything up-to full-mesh at a socket-level and not need to worry about the availability of a... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Crossing the Impossible FFI Boundary, and My Gradual Descent into Madness
    Https://zeromq.org/ -> TIL really cool, thanks for the pointer. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago
  • Omegle is Gone, What Will Fill It's Gap?
    In this post from 2011, the creator of Omegle, Leif Brooks, explains what technology is used, including Python and a library called gevent for the backend. On top of that, Adobe Cirrus is used for streaming video. Though this post was 12 years ago, it is valuable to know what a web application like Omegle requires. A modern library that may provide some functionality for a text chat at a minimum may be... Source: over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Resque and ZeroMQ, you can also consider the following products

Sidekiq - Sidekiq is a simple, efficient framework for background job processing in Ruby

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Hangfire - An easy way to perform background processing in .NET and .NET Core applications.

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

delayed_job - Database based asynchronous priority queue system -- Extracted from Shopify - collectiveidea/delayed_job

Apache ActiveMQ - Apache ActiveMQ is an open source messaging and integration patterns server.