Comments on: More Asynchronous Processing

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:42:54 +0000

Yes, the create_xxxx call is synchronous, and you’re right. I was confusing the original issue I had. My original issue with link_to was that I was sending emails from other workling tasks, and it’s those that do not have access to the HOST value. Therefore, emails sent from the web app should work fine. Thanks for catching that!

Regarding large messages, I have not noticed any issues. Generally, the emails that I send are pretty small (a few k), so it’s not a big deal. Looking at the Starling source, I suspect the issue with large messages has more to do with the queue being in memory than anything technical.

By: Aaron Gibralter

Aaron Gibralter — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:29:39 +0000

Doesn’t the create_xxxx call happen synchronously? So shouldn’t the link_tos function “correctly” (with host and all) since they get called in the mongrel process before it gets handed off to workling?

Also, have you noticed any problems with large messages? I thought the idea of Workling/Starlign was to send short messages… The entire TMail seems like a potentially large thing to send via a starling queue. Is there a way to instead send the Mailer’s arguments rather than the TMail itself?

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:52:38 +0000

This is pretty much exactly the same thing as I did, but it is wrapped up in a plugin. The other difference is that they are not using Starling. If you are already using Starling, then there is no need to add another queue server to the mix.

However, either way will work perfectly.

By: Neil

Neil — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:42:41 +0000

Looks like the Workling guys have done it again – their latest post shows a really, really easy way to create async outgoing email by default;

http://playtype.net/past/2008/11/11/sending_mail_asynchronously_in_rails/

I haven’t tried it but I could end up implementing it soon. How does that look to you, Dave?

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:57:53 +0000

To be specific, link_to and other helpers still work. It’s only the routing helpers that require a HOST that do not work. That means all the *_url helpers will have a problem. You can play games with _path methods and prefix your own HOST to it. That’s what I do.

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:29:35 +0000

Great post. That’s handy a snippet – if it wasn’t for the loss of helpers (although I’m pretty sure I don’t have any link_tos in mailer templates anymore), I’d give this a go right now.

I was looking for a similar solution a little while back, but the engine yard engineers (the app being hosted on engine yard) said that a single outgoing email per action isn’t such a big deal because of their shared architecture – it seems they take the outgoing emails from your app and send it themselves. So, I’ve implemented async processing for the four or so mailer methods which can potentially create more than one recipient (activity notifications within ‘groups’) and have to cycle through recipients to do so (plus I couldn’t work out how to do your auto-async trick at the time, but now I know!).