FastQ

A high-performance job queue written in C, backed by Redis.

FastQ aims to be faster, leaner on RAM, and polyglot compared to existing job queue solutions like BullMQ, Sidekiq, or Celery.

Features

Core (free)

• Fast push/pop via Redis Lists with MULTI/EXEC pipelining
• Priority queues (high / normal / low)
• Multi-threaded worker pool (pthreads) with Redis connection pooling
• Automatic retries with exponential backoff
• Dead Letter Queue for permanently failed jobs
• Crash recovery for orphaned jobs
• Daemon mode with systemd support
• Python bindings (CPython C extension)
• Node.js bindings (N-API)
• CLI tool (fastq push, pop, stats, worker, recover)
• Colored logging (DEBUG/INFO/WARN/ERROR)
• Zero external runtime dependencies beyond Redis

Pro

• Cron scheduler — persistent cron jobs and one-shot delayed jobs, survive restarts
• Rate limiting — token-bucket limiter attached per worker
• Batch processing — pop up to N jobs in one shot with a deadline
• Job chaining — automatically push a child job when a parent completes
• DAG workflows — multi-step dependency graphs; dependents unlock atomically
• Metrics — Prometheus /metrics and JSON /health HTTP endpoint
• HMAC license — key verification with constant-time comparison (OpenSSL)

Building

Dependencies

• hiredis — Redis C client
• json-c — JSON parsing
• OpenSSL — HMAC-SHA256 (license + TLS)
• Redis server (runtime)

Compile

make          # library + CLI
make test     # run all tests
make bench    # throughput benchmark
make python   # Python C extension
make node     # Node.js N-API addon

Run tests

# Start a dev Redis instance (in a separate terminal)
./run_redis.sh

make test

# Run tests under Valgrind
make valgrind

Benchmark

make bench

Python bindings

make python
python3 -c "import fastq; q = fastq.Queue('myqueue'); q.push('{\"hello\":1}')"

Node.js bindings

make node
node -e "const { Queue } = require('./bindings/node'); const q = new Queue('127.0.0.1', 6379, 'myqueue'); console.log(q.push('{\"hello\":1}'));"

Project Structure

fastq/
├── src/                # Core library source
├── include/            # Public headers
├── tests/              # Unit and integration tests (38 tests, 7 suites)
├── benchmarks/         # Throughput benchmarks
├── bindings/
│   ├── python/         # Python CPython extension
│   └── node/           # Node.js N-API addon
├── docs/               # Architecture & API design docs
├── Makefile
├── fastq.service       # systemd unit file
└── run_redis.sh        # Dev Redis launcher

Roadmap

Done

• Core engine, priority queues, multi-threaded workers, connection pooling
• Crash recovery, daemon mode, CLI
• Python and Node.js bindings
• Cron scheduler, rate limiter, batch processing
• Job chaining and DAG workflows
• Prometheus metrics, health endpoint
• HMAC license system
• 38 tests across 7 suites, all passing

Next

• Go / Rust bindings
• Web UI
• Kubernetes operator

License

TBD