Differentiate between queue-time and execution-time in lock_args

[pboling]

Given that:

• :until_and_while_executing is two discrete locks, allowing one copy of a job to be executing, while another copy is queued waiting for the first to finish:
  • one lock for executing jobs, and
  • one lock for queued jobs.
  • these locks are defined with different prefixes/suffixes attached to the result of lock_args, which ostensibly returns the same value for queue-time as it does for execution-time.

I have a scenario where I want lock args to effectively return a random result at runtime, but I want it to lock uniquely based on the job's arguments at queue-time. In other words I want a neatly structured set of unique jobs in the queue, but when pulled off the queue to run, I want them to randomly succeed or fail, and I need this to happen via the locking mechanism.

Is it possible to differentiate between queue-time and execution-time within the lock_args, so we can tell which lock the result of the method is targeting?

[pboling]

Fundamentally what I was looking for was concurrency limiting, falling back on the retries to simulate a concurrency limit. I think I can accomplish what I want with https://github.com/ixti/sidekiq-throttled instead.