Beanstalk, a Simple and Fast Queueing Backend

Ilya Grigorik pointed me toward Beanstalk, a job queueing backend inspired by Memcache. It’s simple, lightweight, and completely specialized on job queueing. They use it at PostRank to process millions of jobs a day, so it does perform at scale.

I’ve found Beanstalk to be a joy to use. The difference between RabbitMQ and Beanstalk reminds me of the difference between Apache and Nginx, or between Squid and Varnish. It gives 80% the functionality with 20% the weight and complexity. The authors have definitely achieved their goal of making a job queueing backend which has the same clean simplicity as memcached.
(Link: Beanstalk, a Simple and Fast Queueing Backend)