Unlimited RQ / remote dynamic code executor

[pocesar]

Brainstorm time. Express server that has 2 endpoints:

• /register

  • Registers a callback, and you receive an id later. it evals the payload and keep in memory. this is only for not sending the whole function every time on /request. Using the id received here calls the same evaled function using /request

• /request

  • FIFO Queue the request (the same RequestOptions format) in memory.
  • would be on a 32GB instance with worker_threads (pool of 7-8 threads) in a work stealing manner.
  • use a SharedArrayBuffer with the JSON in string format, JSON.parse inside the worker?
  • Bilateral communication can work with MessageChannel. Maybe call Apify.pushData from the received message? or inside the worker? (might overload the dataset endpoint)
  • Persists remaining requests to RL on migration, using the same id from register, so we know which one belongs to where and can be loaded from the KV.

1. how retries are done? they come back to the queue or stay retrying until giving up?
2. Registering the code from the "main" process (ie. another scraper/task) can serialize the function as in:

   await fetch(/* container url register */, { 
     body: myWorkerCode.toString()
   })

3. since it's a fire-and-forget mechanism (and the data will be pushed to the designated dataset), how could de-duping occur?

[metalwarrior665]

There are definitely plenty of ways we could do this. I would probably start with trying to mimic the queue we have with most of its functionality. Then it could just work the same in crawlers, just instead of calling Apify API, it would call the server. The server could run on the same actor or spawn another actor.

1. We can mimic how Apify queue works
2. I'm not sure if I understand this
3. Why push to a dataset? I thought we would keep an object/Map in memory. Probably I'm thinking about something else :)

[pocesar]

actually, the "Unlimited RQ" is misnomer. it works as a remote dynamic code executor, but faster than RQ / enqueueing, as they are dealt as they arrive. the detail extraction worker code is passed to the server on register.