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Sidekiq development guidelines

We use Sidekiq as our background job processor. These guides are for writing jobs that works well on GitLab.com and be consistent with our existing worker classes. For information on administering GitLab, see configuring Sidekiq.

There are pages with additional detail on the following topics:

  1. Compatibility across updates
  2. Job idempotence and job deduplication
  3. Limited capacity worker: continuously performing work with a specified concurrency
  4. Logging
  5. Worker attributes
    1. Job urgency specifies queuing and execution SLOs
    2. Resource boundaries and external dependencies for describing the workload
    3. Feature categorization
    4. Database load balancing

ApplicationWorker

All workers should include ApplicationWorker instead of Sidekiq::Worker, which adds some convenience methods and automatically sets the queue based on the routing rules.

Retries

Sidekiq defaults to using 25 retries, with back-off between each retry. 25 retries means that the last retry would happen around three weeks after the first attempt (assuming all 24 prior retries failed).

This means that a lot can happen in between the job being scheduled and its execution. Therefore, we must guard workers so they don't fail 25 times when the state changes after they are scheduled. For example, a job should not fail when the project it was scheduled for is deleted.

Instead of:

def perform(project_id)
  project = Project.find(project_id)
  # ...
end

Do this:

def perform(project_id)
  project = Project.find_by_id(project_id)
  return unless project
  # ...
end

For most workers - especially idempotent workers - the default of 25 retries is more than sufficient. Many of our older workers declare 3 retries, which used to be the default within the GitLab application. 3 retries happen over the course of a couple of minutes, so the jobs are prone to failing completely.

A lower retry count may be applicable if any of the below apply:

  1. The worker contacts an external service and we do not provide guarantees on delivery. For example, webhooks.
  2. The worker is not idempotent and running it multiple times could leave the system in an inconsistent state. For example, a worker that posts a system note and then performs an action: if the second step fails and the worker retries, the system note is posted again.
  3. The worker is a cronjob that runs frequently. For example, if a cron job runs every hour, then we don't need to retry beyond an hour because we don't need two of the same job running at once.

Each retry for a worker is counted as a failure in our metrics. A worker which always fails 9 times and succeeds on the 10th would have a 90% error rate.

If you want to manually retry the worker without tracking the exception in Sentry, use an exception class inherited from Gitlab::SidekiqMiddleware::RetryError.

ServiceUnavailable = Class.new(::Gitlab::SidekiqMiddleware::RetryError)

def perform
  ...

  raise ServiceUnavailable if external_service_unavailable?
end

Failure handling

Failures are typically handled by Sidekiq itself, which takes advantage of the inbuilt retry mechanism mentioned above. You should allow exceptions to be raised so that Sidekiq can reschedule the job.

If you need to perform an action when a job fails after all of its retry attempts, add it to the sidekiq_retries_exhausted method.

sidekiq_retries_exhausted do |msg, ex|
  project = Project.find(msg['args'].first)
  project.perform_a_rollback # handle the permanent failure
end

def perform(project_id)
  project = Project.find(project_id)
  project.some_action # throws an exception
end

Sidekiq Queues

Previously, each worker had its own queue, which was automatically set based on the worker class name. For a worker named ProcessSomethingWorker, the queue name would be process_something. You can now route workers to a specific queue using queue routing rules. In GDK, new workers are routed to a queue named default.

If you're not sure what queue a worker uses, you can find it using SomeWorker.queue. There is almost never a reason to manually override the queue name using sidekiq_options queue: :some_queue.

After adding a new worker, run bin/rake gitlab:sidekiq:all_queues_yml:generate to regenerate app/workers/all_queues.yml or ee/app/workers/all_queues.yml so that it can be picked up by sidekiq-cluster in installations that don't use routing rules. For more information about potential changes, see epic 596.

Additionally, run bin/rake gitlab:sidekiq:sidekiq_queues_yml:generate to regenerate config/sidekiq_queues.yml.

Queue Namespaces

While different workers cannot share a queue, they can share a queue namespace.

Defining a queue namespace for a worker makes it possible to start a Sidekiq process that automatically handles jobs for all workers in that namespace, without needing to explicitly list all their queue names. If, for example, all workers that are managed by sidekiq-cron use the cronjob queue namespace, we can spin up a Sidekiq process specifically for these kinds of scheduled jobs. If a new worker using the cronjob namespace is added later on, the Sidekiq process also picks up jobs for that worker (after having been restarted), without the need to change any configuration.

A queue namespace can be set using the queue_namespace DSL class method:

class SomeScheduledTaskWorker
  include ApplicationWorker

  queue_namespace :cronjob

  # ...
end

Behind the scenes, this sets SomeScheduledTaskWorker.queue to cronjob:some_scheduled_task. Commonly used namespaces have their own concern module that can easily be included into the worker class, and that may set other Sidekiq options besides the queue namespace. CronjobQueue, for example, sets the namespace, but also disables retries.

bundle exec sidekiq is namespace-aware, and listens on all queues in a namespace (technically: all queues prefixed with the namespace name) when a namespace is provided instead of a simple queue name in the --queue (-q) option, or in the :queues: section in config/sidekiq_queues.yml.

Adding a worker to an existing namespace should be done with care, as the extra jobs take resources away from jobs from workers that were already there, if the resources available to the Sidekiq process handling the namespace are not adjusted appropriately.

Versioning

Version can be specified on each Sidekiq worker class. This is then sent along when the job is created.

class FooWorker
  include ApplicationWorker

  version 2

  def perform(*args)
    if job_version == 2
      foo = args.first['foo']
    else
      foo = args.first
    end
  end
end

Under this schema, any worker is expected to be able to handle any job that was enqueued by an older version of that worker. This means that when changing the arguments a worker takes, you must increment the version (or set version 1 if this is the first time a worker's arguments are changing), but also make sure that the worker is still able to handle jobs that were queued with any earlier version of the arguments. From the worker's perform method, you can read self.job_version if you want to specifically branch on job version, or you can read the number or type of provided arguments.

Job size

GitLab stores Sidekiq jobs and their arguments in Redis. To avoid excessive memory usage, we compress the arguments of Sidekiq jobs if their original size is bigger than 100 KB.

After compression, if their size still exceeds 5 MB, it raises an ExceedLimitError error when scheduling the job.

If this happens, rely on other means of making the data available in Sidekiq. There are possible workarounds such as:

  • Rebuild the data in Sidekiq with data loaded from the database or elsewhere.
  • Store the data in object storage before scheduling the job, and retrieve it inside the job.

Job weights

Some jobs have a weight declared. This is only used when running Sidekiq in the default execution mode - using sidekiq-cluster does not account for weights.

As we are moving towards using sidekiq-cluster in Free, newly-added workers do not need to have weights specified. They can use the default weight, which is 1.

Tests

Each Sidekiq worker must be tested using RSpec, just like any other class. These tests should be placed in spec/workers.

Interacting with Sidekiq Redis and APIs

The application should minimise interaction with of any Sidekiq.redis and Sidekiq APIs. Such interactions in generic application logic should be abstracted to a Sidekiq middleware for re-use across teams. By decoupling application logic from Sidekiq datastore, it allows for greater freedom when horizontally scaling the GitLab background processing setup.

Some exceptions to this rule would be migration-related logic or administration operations.