BullMQ: Production-Grade Job Queues for Node.js

BullMQ: Production-Grade Job Queues for Node.js Doing heavy work inside an HTTP request is a recipe for timeouts and poor UX. BullMQ moves work out of the request cycle into background workers — with retries, priorities, and rate limiting built in. Why a Job Queue Don't do in a request: Sending emails (slow, can fail) Image processing (CPU-bound) Calling external APIs (unreliable) Generating reports (memory-heavy) Do instead: add a job to the queue, return 200 immediately, process in a worker. Setup npm install bullmq ioredis Producer import { Queue } from 'bullmq'; import { Redis } from 'ioredis'; const connection = new Redis(process.env.REDIS_URL!, { maxRetriesPerRequest: null }); export const emailQueue = new Queue('emails', { connection }); export const imageQueue = new Queue('images', { connection }); // Add jobs from your API routes await emailQueue.add('welcome', { to: user.email, firstName: user.firstName, }, { attempts: 3, backoff: { type: 'exponential', delay: 2000 }, }); Wor