Background Job Queues

Some analyses in Arx can take a while to run. Instead of blocking the browser, these are processed in the background by a job queue. You can close the tab or even log out — jobs keep running on the server and the results will be waiting for you when you return.

The Job Queues page gives you an overview of your recent jobs: their status (queued, running, done, failed), elapsed time, and a direct link to reopen the results.

Tools that use background jobs

Tool	Description
BLAST Search	BLAST searches against large genome sets run asynchronously. Results are stored and can be reopened at any time.
Phylogenetic Trees	Genome-similarity (ANI) and core-genome (OrthoFinder) trees are computed in the background, as these calculations can take several minutes.

Configuration

The job queue is powered by Huey with Redis as the message broker. Redis is a fast in-memory data store used here to pass jobs between the web server and the background workers. In the default single-container setup, Redis is started automatically — no separate installation is needed.

Setting	Environment variable	Default
Number of parallel workers	HUEY_WORKERS	4
Redis connection	REDIS_URL / REDIS_HOST / REDIS_PORT	built-in Redis

Increase HUEY_WORKERS if you expect many concurrent users or want BLAST and tree jobs to run in parallel. See Environment Configuration for the full list of Redis and queue settings.