我是否应该使用Laravel队列来管理应用程序中的线程

Question

I am looking to hit multiple 3rd party APIs to gather information for a user's search query. I am planning to spin off a thread for each API I want to hit to minimize the response time on my end. I also want to limit the amount of threads my application can have running at any one time due to memory/cpu concerns.

Since I am using Laravel as my framework, I was trying to accomplish this using Laravel queues, but it seems that I might have trouble getting the response data from the Job.

• Are laravel queues the correct way to tackle this? If so how do I listen for the job's status and retrieve the data once the job is complete? I see some things that point towards passing a closure to the job, but something just isn't clicking for me.

Answer 1

It depends. A job queue and worker pool might be appropriate if there are a really huge number of API calls to make, especially if those API calls can be very slow. But, I'd try to avoid all that architecture unless you're really sure you need it.

To start, I'd look at doing async requests to the external APIs, and try to keep the whole thing in a single process. The Guzzle HTTP client library provides a very programmer-friendly API for doing this kind of asynchronous requests.

If the external requests are really numerous or slow, you might consider using a queue. But in that case, you're looking at implementing a bunch of logic to queue all the jobs, then poll until they're done (giving feedback to your user along the way), and finally return the merged result. That may end up being necessary, but I'd start with the simpler implementation I describe above.