Using Multiple Temporal Task Queues

Temporal gives you flexibility to define different task queues to route workflows and activities to specific workers. When a worker starts up, it is configured to consume from a specific task queue by name, along with the activities and workflows it is capable of running.

For example:

import asyncio
import concurrent.futures

from activities import my_good_activity
from temporalio.client import Client
from temporalio.worker import Worker
from workflows import MyGoodWorkflow


async def main():
    client = await Client(...)

    with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=100) as activity_executor:
        worker = Worker(
            client,
            task_queue="my-task-queue",
            workflows=[MyGoodWorkflow],
            activities=[my_good_activity],
            activity_executor=activity_executor,
        )
        await worker.run()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Starting worker")
    asyncio.run(main())

Let’s say we wanted to execute the workflows using one task queue and the activities with another. We could write two separate workers, like this.

For workflows:

import asyncio
import concurrent.futures

from temporalio.client import Client
from temporalio.worker import Worker
from workflows import MyGoodWorkflow


async def main():
    client = await Client(...)

    worker = Worker(
        client,
        task_queue="my-workflow-task-queue",
        workflows=[MyGoodWorkflow],
        activities=[],
    )
    await worker.run()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Starting workflow worker")
    asyncio.run(main())

For activities:

import asyncio
import concurrent.futures

from activities import my_good_activity
from temporalio.client import Client
from temporalio.worker import Worker


async def main():
    client = await Client(...)

    with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=100) as activity_executor:
        worker = Worker(
            client,
            task_queue="my-activity-task-queue",
            workflows=[],
            activities=[my_good_activity],
            activity_executor=activity_executor,
        )
        await worker.run()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Starting activity worker")
    asyncio.run(main())

If we run each of these workers independently

python -m run_workflow_worker

python -m run_activity_worker

now we can start a workflow and the two worker processes will execute the workflow and activity code:

import asyncio
import uuid

from temporalio.client import Client
from workflows import MyGoodWorkflow, MyWorkflowGoodArgs


async def main():
    client = await Client(...)

    result = await client.execute_workflow(
        MyGoodWorkflow.run,
        MyWorkflowArgs(
            arg1="good",
            arg2="workflow",
        ),
        id=str(uuid.uuid4()),
        task_queue="my-workflow-task-queue",
    )

    print(f"Workflow completed with result: {result}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

If we did it right, when we run a workflow, we can see each task queue show up separately in the Temporal UI.

Temporal UI showing different task queue names

Note: the Temporal samples-python has a multi-language example of this pattern using Python and Go.