BullMQ Redis memory monitor

Avoiding Redis Crashes with BullMQ: Memory Monitoring Basics

If you’re using BullMQ with Redis in production, you’ve probably dealt with a “wtf happened” moment after Redis hit its memory limit. 🧨😐

We hit this once (on a Sunday, naturally). Since then, we started tracking Redis memory usage per instance and get notified when we hit ~80% of capacity.

💡 Turns out some Redis hosts don’t expose their max memory, so we set a manual threshold in MB. Helps us catch issues way before Redis shuts the door on writes.

We later baked this into our own job monitoring tool. If you want to keep things simple and focused on BullMQ, we made Upqueue.io to alert on stuff like memory spikes, stuck queues, and missing workers.

But tool or not—do monitor your Redis memory. Especially if you’re chaining long-running jobs or dealing with a backlog.

What are you all using? Custom scripts? Hosted dashboards?