ardiq 0.2.0

A fast distributed task queue with a Rust core and a Python API, backed by Redis streams.

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A fast distributed task queue with a Rust core and a clean Python API, backed by Redis streams.

ArdiQ runs the worker loop and all Redis I/O in Rust (via PyO3 + tokio); you write tasks in plain Python. The two meet at a single async callback, with the GIL held only for the microseconds it takes to start a task and read its result — so a single process handles high concurrency.

Features

• 🦀 Rust core — the loop and Redis I/O run on tokio, off the GIL
• Priority queues — higher-priority tasks are consumed first
• Delayed & scheduled tasks (delay_ms / schedule_ms)
• Cron & recurring tasks (@app.cron) — 5-field cron (UTC) or every= intervals
• Automatic retries with quadratic backoff, configurable per task
• Crash recovery — in-flight tasks of a dead worker are reclaimed (XAUTOCLAIM)
• Results with TTL, plus task status (queued / running / complete / not_found)
• Sync & async tasks — blocking sync functions run in a thread pool
• CLI worker (ardiq run module:app) and burst mode (drain the queue and exit)

Performance

Because the worker loop and every Redis round-trip run in Rust — off the GIL — ArdiQ delivers top-tier throughput at a fraction of the memory of comparable Python task queues.

Benchmarked head-to-head against arq, Taskiq, Streaq, Celery and Dramatiq on the same machine (1,000 tasks, one worker, 10 concurrent):

Queue	Throughput	Memory
ArdiQ 🦀	top tier	~34 MB 🪶
Taskiq	top tier	~95 MB
Streaq	fast	~50 MB
arq	fast	~30 MB

• 🏆 Among the fastest async queues on both CPU- and I/O-bound workloads — effectively tied with the leader.
• 🪶 Lightest in its class — roughly a third of the memory of the next-fastest queue, and the lowest footprint of any queue at its performance level.
• 📈 Near the theoretical ceiling on I/O work — practically network-bound, with nothing lost to scheduling.
• 🎯 Rock-steady — negligible variance run to run.

Throughput is shaped by hardware and workload, and the GIL caps in-process CPU work for every Python queue (ArdiQ included). The full, reproducible suite — with the honest caveats — lives in the benchmark repo.

When to use ArdiQ

Reach for ArdiQ when you want:

• High concurrency on a small footprint — async-native, with the loop and Redis I/O in Rust, so one process does a lot without eating memory.
• A modern, typed API — @app.task, awaitable enqueue, Job handles, results and status built in.
• Reliability out of the box — priorities, retries with backoff, delayed and scheduled tasks, and crash recovery via Redis consumer groups.
• Redis you already run — no extra broker to operate.

Consider the alternatives when:

• You need to saturate many CPU cores in one process — like every single-process Python queue, ArdiQ runs your task body under the GIL, so CPU-bound work is serial per worker (scale out with more workers). For heavy CPU fan-out, a prefork model (Celery, Dramatiq) can be simpler.
• You need a large, battle-tested ecosystem today — Celery has years of integrations, schedulers, and dashboards. ArdiQ is young and moving fast.
• You can't run Redis — ArdiQ is Redis-only by design.

ArdiQ sits alongside arq / Taskiq / Streaq as a modern async queue — its edge is the Rust core (memory and per-task overhead) and a batteries-included API.

Installation

$ pip install ardiq

The base install is the library only — a single runtime dependency (msgpack) — enough to define tasks, enqueue them, and run a worker from your own code (await app.run()). For the ardiq worker command, add the CLI extra:

$ pip install 'ardiq[cli]'

You also need a Redis server — the quickest way is Docker:

$ docker run -d --name ardiq-redis -p 6379:6379 redis

or install it from your package manager (or redis.io).

Building from source (if you want to hack on ArdiQ itself): you'll need Rust and uv. Clone the repo and run uv sync.

Quickstart

Define an app and some tasks (example.py):

from ardiq import Ardiq

app = Ardiq(redis_url="redis://localhost:6379", queue_name="example")


@app.task()
async def add(a: int, b: int) -> int:
    return a + b


@app.task(max_retries=3)
def slow_double(x: int) -> int:   # sync task — runs in a thread
    return x * 2

Start a worker:

$ ardiq run example:app

Enqueue tasks from anywhere and read their results:

import asyncio
from example import add


async def main():
    job = await add.enqueue(2, 3)        # returns a Job handle
    print(job.id)
    print(await job.status())            # 'queued' | 'running' | 'complete'
    print(await job.result(timeout=5))   # waits → TaskResult(success=True, value=5, tries=1)


asyncio.run(main())

Or run the whole thing in one process with python example.py, which enqueues a few tasks and processes them in burst mode.

Recurring tasks

Register a task to run on a schedule with @app.cron — either a standard 5-field cron expression (evaluated in UTC) or a fixed every= interval:

@app.cron("0 3 * * *")            # daily at 03:00 UTC
async def nightly_report():
    ...


@app.cron(every=30)               # every 30s — int/float seconds or a timedelta
async def heartbeat():
    ...

Recurring tasks fire while a worker is running, and each occurrence is an ordinary task with its own result, status, retries and timeout. The cron syntax is the common subset — *, lists ,, ranges a-b, and steps */n — at minute resolution; use every= for sub-minute schedules.

Configuration

Ardiq(...) accepts:

Option	Default	Description
redis_url	redis://localhost:6379	Redis connection URL
queue_name	"default"	Logical queue (key namespace)
priorities	["default"]	Priority names, lowest-first
concurrency	16	Max tasks running at once
prefetch	concurrency * 2	Max tasks held in memory (drives backpressure)
idle_timeout_ms	60000	When an unrenewed in-flight task may be reclaimed
result_ttl_ms	300000	How long results live (0 drops, negative keeps forever)
burst	False	Exit once the queue drains
serializer / deserializer	msgpack	Wire codec; pass pickle.dumps/pickle.loads to send datetimes/objects
cron_poll_s	1.0	How often the worker restages due @app.cron occurrences

@app.task(...) accepts name, max_retries (default 3), backoff_ms, timeout (seconds), and priority. @app.cron(spec, *, every=…, …) takes those same per-task options plus the schedule. Use task.options(delay_ms=…, schedule_ms=…, priority=…, task_id=…).enqueue(...) for one-off overrides.

Development

$ docker compose up -d      # Redis on localhost:6379
$ uv run pytest             # test suite (needs Redis)
$ uv run ruff check .       # lint
$ uv run ty check ardiq tests   # type-check

After changing the Rust core, rebuild with uv sync --reinstall-package ardiq.

License

MIT