BeanStalk

Beanstalk is a simple, fast work queue.
Its interface is generic, but was originally designed for reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running time-consuming tasks asynchronously.

News

Run It

First, run beanstalkd on one or more machines. There is no configuration file and only a handful of command-line options.

$ ./beanstalkd -l 10.0.1.5 -p 11300

This starts up beanstalkd listening on address 10.0.1.5, port 11300. For more information on how to run beanstalkd as a background service, in production, see the adm directory.

Use It

Here’s an example in Ruby – see the client libraries to find your favorite language.
First, have one process put a job into the queue:

beanstalk = Beanstalk::Pool.new([‘10.0.1.5:11300’])
beanstalk.put(‘hello’)

Then start another process to take jobs out of the queue and run them:

beanstalk = Beanstalk::Pool.new([‘10.0.1.5:11300’])
loop do
  job = beanstalk.reserve
  puts job.body # prints “hello”
  job.delete
end

History

Philotic, Inc. developed beanstalk to improve the response time for the Causes on Facebook application (with over 9.5 million users). Beanstalk decreased the average response time for the most common pages to a tiny fraction of the original, significantly improving the user experience.

Bugs

Please report any bugs to the mailing list.

Thanks

Many thanks to memcached for providing inspiration for simple protocol design and for the structure of the documentation. Not to mention a fantastic piece of software!