Job Manager

A manager for jobs (aka tasks) that have to be performed asynchronously, optionally recurring, scheduled or one-off in their nature. The job queue is manage in memory without additional dependencies.

Install

npm install @tryghost/job-manager --save

yarn add @tryghost/job-manager

Usage

Below is a sample code to wire up job manger and initialize jobs:

const JobManager = require('@tryghost/job-manager');

const logging = {
    info: console.log,
    warn: console.log,
    error: console.error
};

const jobManager = new JobManager(logging);

// register a job "function" with queued execution in current event loop
jobManager.addJob({
    job: printWord(word) => console.log(word),
    name: 'hello',
    offloaded: false
});

// register a job "module" with queued execution in current even loop
jobManager.addJob({
    job:'./path/to/email-module.js',
    data: {email: 'send@here.com'},
    offloaded: false
});

// register recurring job which needs execution outside of current event loop
jobManager.addJob({
    at: 'every 5 minutes',
    job: './path/to/jobs/check-emails.js',
    name: 'email-checker'
});

// register recurring job with cron syntax running every 5 minutes
// job needs execution outside of current event loop
// for cron builder check https://crontab.guru/ (first value is seconds)
jobManager.addJob({
    at: '0 1/5 * * * *',
    job: './path/to/jobs/check-emails.js',
    name: 'email-checker-cron'
});

// register a job to un immediately running outside of current even loop
jobManager.addJob({
    job: './path/to/jobs/check-emails.js',
    name: 'email-checker-now'
});

For more examples of JobManager initialization check test/examples directory.

Job types and definitions

There are two types of jobs distinguished based on purpose and environment they run in:

"inline" - job which is run in the same even loop as the caller. Should be used in situations when there is no even loop blocking operations and no need to manage memory leaks in sandboxed way. Sometimes
"offloaded" - job which is executed in separate to caller's event loop. For Node >v12 clients it spawns a Worker thread, for older Node runtimes it is executed in separate process through child_process. Comparing to inline jobs, offloaded jobs are safer to execute as they are run on a dedicated thread (or process) acting like a sandbox. These jobs also give better utilization of multi-core CPUs. This type of jobs is useful when there are heavy computations needed to be done blocking the event loop or need a sandboxed environment to run in safely. Example jobs would be: statistical information processing, memory intensive computations (e.g. recursive algorithms), processing that requires blocking I/O operations etc.

Job manager's instance registers jobs through addJob method. The offloaded parameter controls if the job is inline (executed in the same event loop) or is offloaded (executed in worker thread/separate process). By default offloaded is set to true - creates an "offloaded" job.

When offloaded: false parameter is passed into addJob method, job manager registers an inline function for execution in FIFO queue. The job should not be computationally intensive and should have small amount of asynchronous operations. The developer should always account that the function will be executed on the same event loop, thread and process as caller's process. inline jobs should be JavaScript functions or a path to a module that exports a function as default. Note, at the moment it's not possible to defined scheduled or recurring inline job.

When skipped or offloaded: true parameter is passed into addJob method, job manager registers execution of an offloaded job. The job can be scheduled to run immediately, in the future, or in recurring manner (through at parameter). Jobs created this way are managed by bree job scheduling library. For examples of job scripts check out this section of bree's documentation, test job examples.

Offloaded jobs rules of thumb

To prevent complications around failed job retries and and handling of specific job states here are some rules that should be followed for all scheduled jobs:

Jobs are self contained - meaning job manager should be able to run the job with the state information included within the job's parameters. Job script should look up for the rest of needed information from somewhere else, like a database, API, or file.
Jobs should be idempotent - consequent job executions should be safe.
Job parameters should be kept to the minimum. When passing large amounts of data around performance can suffer from slow JSON serialization. Also, storage size restrictions that can arise if there is a need to store parameters in the future.Job parameters should be kept to only information that is needed to retrieve the rest of information from somewhere else. For example, it's recommended to pass in only an id of the resource that could be fetched from the data storage during job execution or pass in a file path which could be read during execution.
Scheduled job execution time should not overlap. It's up to the registering service to assure job execution time does not ecceed time between subsequent scheduled jobs. For example, if job is scheduled to run every 5 minutes it should always run under 5 minutes, otherwise next scheduled job would fail to start.

Offloaded jobs lifecycle

Offloaded jobs are running on dedicated worker threads which makes their lifecycle a bit different to inline jobs:

When starting a job it's only sharing ENV variables with it's parent process. The job itself is run on an independent JavaScript execution thread. The script has to re-initialize any modules it will use. For example it should take care of: model layer initialization, cache initialization, etc.
When finishing work in a job prefer to signal successful termination by sending 'done' message to the parent thread: parentPort.postMessage('done') (example use). Finishing work this way terminates the thread through worker.terminate(), which logs termination in parent process and flushes any pipes opened in thread.
Jobs that have iterative nature, or need cleanup before interrupting work should allow for graceful shutdown by listening on 'cancel' message coming from parent thread (example use).
When exceptions happen and expected outcome is to terminate current job, leave the exception unhandled allowing it to bubble up to the job manager. Unhandled exceptions terminate current thread and allow for next scheduled job execution to happen.

For more nuances on job structure best practices check bree documentation.

Offloaded job script quirks

⚠️ to ensure worker thread back compatibility and correct inter-thread communication use btrheads polyfill instead of native worker_threads module in job scripts.

Instead of:

const {isMainThread, parentPort} = require('worker_threads');

use

const {isMainThread, parentPort} = require('bthreads');

It should be possible to use native worker_threads module once Node v10 hits EOL (2021-04-30).

Develop

This is a mono repository, managed with lerna.

Follow the instructions for the top-level repo.

git clone this repo & cd into it as usual
Run yarn to install top-level dependencies.

Run

yarn dev

Test

yarn lint run just eslint
yarn test run lint and tests

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