Simon Willison’s Weblog

Kestrel. Twitter’s Robey Pointer rewrote their Starling message queue in 1500 lines of Scala, adding reliable fetch (where consumers can confirm their receipt of an item) and blocking fetches, which reduce the need for consumers to poll for updates (and hence solve my only beef with the original Starling). I haven’t tried running this on a low spec VPS yet but it looks very promising.

# 26th February 2009, 10:20 am / kestrel, message-queues, robey-pointer, scala, starling, twitter

Beanstalkd. This is the light-weight cross-language queue I’ve been waiting for. Similar to Starling but your workers don’t need to poll for new jobs; you can call the blocking “reserve” call instead.

# 12th May 2008, 9:12 am / beanstalkd, lightweightqueue, queue, starling

RubyForge: Starling. “Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.”

# 11th January 2008, 9:47 pm / blaine-cook, memcached, message-queues, messaging, queue, ruby, rubyforge, starling, twitter