Running asynchronous jobs in the background (laravel)

Question

I know Laravel's queue drivers such as redis and beanstalkd and I read that you can increase the number of workers for beanstalkd etc. However I'm just not sure if these solutions are right for my scenario. Here's what I need;

I listen to an XML feed over a socket connection, and the data just keeps coming rapidly. forever. I get tens of XML documents in a second.

I read data from this socket line by line, and once I get to the XML closing tag, I send the buffer to another process to be parsed. I used to just encode the xml in base64, and run a separate php process for each xml. shell_exec('php parse.php' . $base64XML);

This allowed me to parse this never ending xml data quite rapidly. Sort of a manual threading. Now I'd like to utilize the same functionality with Laravel, but I wonder if there is a better way to do it. I believe Artisan::call('command') doesn't push it to the background. I could of course do a shell_exec within Laravel too, but I'd like to know if I can benefit from Beanstalkd or a similar solution.

So the real question is this: How can I set the number of queue workers for beanstalkd or redis drivers? Like I want 20 threads running at the same time. More if possible.

A slightly less important question is: How many threads is too many? If I had a very high-end dedicated server that can process the load just fine, would creating 500 threads/workers with these tools cause any problems on the code level?

Answer 1

Well laravel queues are just made for that.

Basicaly, you have to create a Job Class. All the heavy work you want to do on your xml document need to be here. Then, you fetch your xml out of the socket, and as soon as you have received one document, you push it on your Queue.

Later, a queue worker will pick it up from the queue, and do the heavy work.

The advantage of that is that if you queue up documents faster than you work on them, the queue will take care of that high load moment and queue up tasks for later.

I also don't recommend you to do it without a queue (with a fork like you did). In fact, if too much documents come in, you'll create too many childs threads and overload your server. Bookkeeping these threads correctly is risky and not worth it when a simple queue with a fixed number of workers solve all these problems out of the box).