Worker
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A worker is a background process that picks up jobs from a queue and does the heavy lifting. While your main server handles user requests quickly, workers quietly process the slow stuff in the background — sending emails, generating reports, resizing images.
Real Talk
A worker is a separate process or thread that consumes and processes jobs from a queue asynchronously. Workers allow time-consuming tasks to run in the background without blocking the main request/response cycle. They can be scaled independently of the web server.
When You'll Hear This
"The email worker processes 200 messages per minute." / "Add more worker instances to clear the queue backlog."
Related Terms
Background Job
A background job is work your app does behind the scenes that the user doesn't wait for.
Cron Job
A cron job is a task that runs on a schedule automatically. 'Every day at midnight, clean up old sessions.' 'Every hour, send digest emails.
Message Queue
A Message Queue is a waiting room for tasks. Producers drop tasks in the queue, consumers pick them up and process them one at a time.
Queue
A queue is like a line at a coffee shop — first come, first served. The first person to get in line is the first to get their coffee.