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Comment by Mavvie

2 years ago

How are crashes under your control? Again they aren't talking about uncaught exceptions, but crashes. So maybe the server gets unplugged, the network disconnects, etc.

To me 'crash' means any unexpected termination, whether it's caused by an uncaught exception, OOM, or hardware/network issues.

I guess you can say that hardware issues on your host aren't under your control, but it's under your control to find a host that doesn't have these issues. And not even a full-on ACID database is going to be 100% reliable if you yank the power cord at the wrong moment.

  • I hope my tone doesn't come across as rude or too argumentative, but I think your understanding is a bit inaccurate.

    > it's under your control to find a host that doesn't have these issues

    All hosts will have these issues, the only question is how often. If you need 100% consistency, then you can't use the free Sidekiq. Personally, I've never needed Sidekiq pro (as these kinds of crashes are extremely rare). But this will depend on your scale and use case.

    > And not even a full-on ACID database is going to be 100% reliable if you yank the power cord at the wrong moment

    This is only true if there's bugs in the DB, or some underlying disk corruption happens. The whole point of an ACID database is that they're atomic, durable, and consistent, even in the worst case scenario. If a power failure corrupted my SQL database I would feel very betrayed by the database.

    • It wouldn’t be corrupted, but in-flight transactions could fail to commit, just like queued jobs can be lost with sidekiq. The failure modes are similar.

      I take your point that at a certain scale, hardware failure is inevitable, but if you’re running that many servers, you can afford sidekiq’s enterprise plan. It’s not something that will realistically happen if you’re just running like 20 instances on AWS. It’s perfectly reasonable to charge extra for something only large organizations with huge infrastructure budgets need.

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