Task Queuing the Easy Way With Node.js and BullMQ
As a web developer, it’s crucial that your apps perform as quickly as they can. You should build web apps that respond to requests in the fastest time possible.
One of the many technologies that can help you out is task queuing.
So, what is task queuing, and how can you use it to optimize a Node.js application?
What Is Task Queuing?
Message queuing is a means of asynchronous communication between two applications or services, usually referred to as theproducerandconsumer. It’s a well-known concept employed in serverless and microservice architectures.
The concept oftaskorjobqueuingleverages message queuing to improve application performance. It abstracts the complexities of managing messages and enables you to define functions to manage jobs or tasks asynchronously using a queue, thereby reducing the rate ofmemory usagein some parts of an application.
The most common example of message queue software is RabbitMQ. Task queue tools include Celery and Bull. it’s possible to also configure RabbitMQ to work as a task queue. Read on to learn about task queuing in Node.js using Bull.
What Is BullMQ?
BullMQ (Bull.js) is a Node.js library used for implementing queues in Node applications. Bull is a Redis-based system (you might be more familiar with Redis as a tool forquick data storage) and it is a fast and reliable option to consider for task queuing in Node.js.
you could use Bull for many tasks such as implementing delayed jobs, scheduled jobs, repeatable jobs, priority queues, and many more.
So, how can you use Bull and Redis to run Node.js tasks asynchronously?
How to Configure Bull and Redis for Task Queuing in Node.js
To get started with task queuing in Node.js with Bull, you need Node.js and Redis installed on your machine. You may follow theRedis labs guide to install Redisif you don’t have it installed.
The first step to implementing Bull is to add it to your project’s dependencies by runningnpm install bulloryarn add bullin the terminal inside your project’s folder. There are multiple ways to initialize a queue in Bull as shown below:
These all use minimal configuration for Bull in Node.js. The options object supports many properties and you can learn about them in thequeue options section of Bull’s documentation.
Implementing an Email Task Queue Using BullMQ
To implement a queue for sending emails, you can define your producer function which adds emails to the email queue, and a consumer function to handle the sending of emails.
Firstly, you may initialize your queue in a class using a Redis URL and some queue options as seen below.
Now that you’ve initialized a queue, you can define your producer function (using Bull’sadd()function) as a method of theEmailQueueclass to add emails to the task queue. The following code block demonstrates this:
The producer function is ready, and you may now define a consumer function (using Bull’sprocess()function) to process all email tasks in the queue—i.e. call the function to send an email. You should define this consumer function in the constructor of the class.
A job may also have options to define its behavior in the queue or how the consumer function handles it. you may find out more about this in thejob options section of Bull’s documentation.
TheemailJobargument is an object that contains the properties of the task for the queue to process. It also includes the main data needed to construct the email.For easy understanding, thesendEmail()function would be similar to this example:
Now that you have both the producer and consumer functions defined and ready to use, you may now call your producer function anywhere in your application to add an email to the queue for processing.
An example controller would look like this:
YourqueueHandler.jsfile should now be as follows:
When you implement this in a Node.js REST API, you will notice a decrease in the response time of the signup endpoint, and faster email delivery times, compared to the alternative.
Task queues also enabled you to handle signup and email errors independently.
Optimizing Applications Using Task Queues
Message and task queues are a great way to improve the general performance of applications. They are also very cheap and you could use them in as many parts of an application as you need.
Although this tutorial used emails as an example scenario for handling memory-consuming tasks with queues, there are many other cases where you’re able to apply the same concepts. These include heavy read/write operations, rendering high-quality images or documents, and sending out bulk notifications.
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