delayed_job vs resque

Resque vs DelayedJob

How does Resque compare to DelayedJob, and why would you choose one over the other?

Resque supports multiple queues
DelayedJob supports finer grained priorities
Resque workers are resilient to memory leaks / bloat
DelayedJob workers are extremely simple and easy to modify
Resque requires Redis
DelayedJob requires ActiveRecord
Resque can only place JSONable Ruby objects on a queue as arguments
DelayedJob can place any Ruby object on its queue as arguments
Resque includes a Sinatra app for monitoring what's going on
DelayedJob can be queried from within your Rails app if you want to add an interface

If you're doing Rails development, you already have a database and ActiveRecord. DelayedJob is super easy to setup and works great. GitHub used it for many months to process almost 200 million jobs.

Choose Resque if:

You need multiple queues
You don't care / dislike numeric priorities
You don't need to persist every Ruby object ever
You have potentially huge queues
You want to see what's going on
You expect a lot of failure / chaos
You can setup Redis
You're not running short on RAM

Choose DelayedJob if:

You like numeric priorities
You're not doing a gigantic amount of jobs each day
Your queue stays small and nimble
There is not a lot failure / chaos
You want to easily throw anything on the queue
You don't want to setup Redis

In no way is Resque a "better" DelayedJob, so make sure you pick the tool that's best for your app.