New feature: Free workers

[aslakjo]

First of all thanks for the workless gem, it helped us get going with heroku delayed_job.

However now we are i a situation where we would like to speed up some synchronous jobs. Our jobs are currently useing half of its time waiting for a new worker to be spawned.

I would there for request that workless supports having a number of free workers available for new jobs to use. We would for example in our case have (jobs + 1) workers. Is this a new idea or has it been discussed before?

[robertdapice]

I realise this feature request is more than 6 months old, but FWIW I was looking to do something that would reduce the amount of time jobs spent waiting for workers to start. I realised, though, upon inspecting the workless code, that workless will only ever set workers to either 0 or 1, irrelevant of the length of the job queue. So effectively you may as well set workers to 1 and not use workless at all.

If you have a really high job load, you may want to look at other gems/implementations that can scale to multiple workers depending on the job queue.

[aslakjo]

Thanks for this thorough feedback! We acctually ended up without a worker scaler at all. Setting the number of workers to 1 or 2 depending on load.

Thanks any way.