Can 2 sidekiq worker threads process the same job?

Question

Is it possible that 1 job is being processed twice by 2 different sidekiq threads? I am using sidekiq to insert some analytics events into a mongodb collection, asynchronously. I see around 15 duplicates in that collection. My guess is that 2 worker threads picked the same job, at the same time, and added to the collection.

Does sidekiq ensure that the job is picked only by 1 thread. We can ignore the restart case, as the jobs are small and will complete in less than 8s.

Is firing analytics events asynchronously using sidekiq not a good practice? What are my options? I could add a unique key to the event and check it before insert to avoid insertion of duplicates, but that's adding data (+ an overhead/query) that I am never going to use (and it adds up for millions of events). Can I somehow ensure that a job is processed only once by sidekiq?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

No. Sidekiq uses Redis as a work queue for background processing. Redis provides atomic operations for adding jobs to the queue and popping jobs off of the queue (specifically the redis BRPOP command). Each Sidekiq worker tries to fetch a job from the queue with a timeout via BRPOP and any given job popped from the queue will only be returned to one of the workers pulling work from the queue.

What is more likely is that you are enqueuing multiple jobs.

Another possibility is that your job is throwing an error, causing it to partially execute, and then be re-tried multiple times. By default Sidekiq will retry failed jobs, but doesn't have any built in mechanism for transactions/atomicity of work. ie: If your sidekiq job does A, B, and C and doing B raises an exception, causing the job to fail - it will be retried, causing A to be run again each time the job is retried.