How long can a sucker_punch worker run for on heroku?

Question

I have sucker_punch worker which is processing a csv file, I initially had a problem with the csv file disappearing when the dyno powered down, to fix that i'm gonna set up s3 for file storage.

But my current concern is whether a dyno powering down will stop my worker in it's tracks.

How can I prevent that?

Answer 1

Since sucker_punch uses a separate thread on the same dyno and does not use an external queue or persistence (the way delayed_job, sidekiq, and resque do) you will be subject to losing the job when your dyno gets rebooted or stopped and you'll have no way to restart the job. On Heroku, dynos are rebooted at least once a day. If you need persistence and the ability to retry a job in the event a dyno goes down, I'd say switch to one of the other job libraries:

• https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job
• https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
• https://github.com/resque/resque

However, these require using a Heroku Addon. You can get a way with the free version but you will still have to pay for the extra worker process. Other than that you'd have to implement your own persistence and retrying by wrapping sucker_punch. Here's a discussion on adding those features to sucker_punch: https://github.com/brandonhilkert/sucker_punch/issues/21 They basically say to use Sidekiq instead.