For Airbrake 5, do I need to use Sidekiq?

Question

Environment

• I'm installing Airbrake on Heroku for a Ruby web app (not Rails).

• So Airbrake#notify for Airbrake version 5 for Ruby sends a notification asynchronously.

• My worry is that if I don't use Sidekiq worker + Redis, then it might still be possible that calling Airbrake#notify might still slow down the app's response time depending on how it's used (whether in a Rails-like controller or some other part of the app).

• Besides overcoming the potential issue mentioned above, the other advantage of using Sidekiq worker + Redis to call Airbrake#notify I can think of is that Redis has a couple of persistence strategies so if the app crashes I can backtrack and look over the backed up error notifications from the Sidekiq queue.

• Whereas if I don't use Sidekiq + Redis and the app crashes, then there will be no backed up data....

Questions

• Does that mean I don't need to use Sidekiq + Redis (or some other equivalent database)?

• Am I understanding the issue correctly? I don't have a very complete understanding of "pooled connections" and asynchronous processing, so this makes understanding what to do here a bit challenging.

Answer 1

This is the class that sends async notices https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-ruby/blob/master/lib/airbrake-ruby/async_sender.rb

It's using standard ruby threads to send messages, so no background service should be necessary