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by grandalf 5365 days ago
What's his critique of queues?
1 comments

It's here: http://teddziuba.com/2011/02/the-case-against-queues.html

TL;DR - It's not so much about queues, but about stacks, i.e. new software stacks. His proposition is that quite often you're better off with existing systems. He specifically mentions syslog, so you're logging your tasks and then the consumers monitor this log. Prevents data loss and lets you potentially restart lost tasks.

(That's his argument. I'd agree if you'd have to reimplement something like that in the pre-built *MQ solutions, but I don't know enough about all of them, maybe that – and more – is already in there.)

Interesting. I actually agree with his points (they are consistent with lessons I've learned overusing queues in the past).

I still use queues today, only more judiciously and with the issue of failure states a very well defined part of the design.

He seems to argue against having a blocking worker wait for the queue, which is exactly what you wouldn't do with Node.js