FAQ

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Is LISTEN/NOTIFY used by default, and will this pose a proble for pgBouncer?

Yes, it's on by default. Yes, pgbouncer might pose an issue if it's not done in "connection" mode. We could probably disable it and do polling only (but we don't currently have an option for that), or we could use a separate connection string for the polling (but, again, we don't currently have an option for that IIRC). The issue would be that the events won't necessarily be received, and too many connections will be in the LISTEN state (potentially). Or none... Really depends on the setup.

If you'd like to sponsor improvements in Graphile Worker to accomodate pgBouncer better, please get in touch!

If we have jobs that are scheduled in the future/failed will workers continuously poll to run those jobs, or will the LISTEN/NOTIFY mechanism be used for that?

We use polling for this. We cannot use LISTEN/NOTIFY since there's nothing to generate an event when the time "ticks over".

You can change the poll frequency depending on how accurate you need these to be; it defaults to 2 seconds, but 30 or even 60 seconds is probably fine if you're having performance issues. That said; we always request a new job when the previous job finishes anyway, so if you're scaled enough that your worker is always at full capacity then the poll frequency (and LISTEN/NOTIFY) are kind of irrelevant.

Does each concurrent worker poll the db, or does each instance poll the db and then distribute the jobs to concurrent workers?

Each concurrent worker will ask for a job as soon as the previous job finishes. Each instance will LISTEN for events and when it receives one it will pick an idle worker to ask for jobs. If there is no idle worker then it'll drop the event knowing that when one of the workers finishes they'll ask for the next job anyway.