Casey Liss

Redis, though, is even heavier duty for this case than Beanstalk, which is Beanstalk D is like, what if Memcache D but for queues?

Beanstalk is where I put lighter queue work in Overcast that is not feed crawls.

And that's things like checking for redirects, things like checking for artwork updates on feeds, things like that, sending notifications, processing my ping API, stuff like that.

And so I built transcripts on top of the Beanstalk section of Overcast.

Each of the queue consumers that's running on the Mac minis just hits an API endpoint on Overcast web service and says, hey, give me some jobs, give me some jobs, give me some jobs.

Fairly straightforward setup, I think, for queue processing.

Now, again, there's lots of other queue services, queue stacks, things like that.

I haven't used the services because they're just too expensive.

Again, what Overcast processes overall in its job queues, especially if I include feed crawling,

We're talking over a million jobs a day easily.

Any kind of managed queue service, when you actually price out what it would cost, it's a lot at this scale.

So I don't use those.

I just run it myself and it costs nothing because running Beanstalk D is incredibly lightweight.

It costs nothing.

That's the same reason I send Apple push notifications myself.

I wrote a simple PHP class to do it.

It's not that hard.

And, you know, I manage it through Beanstalk D, and I send them, and it's fine.

Because I send probably millions of push notifications a day.

And it costs me nothing.