Fast and observable background job processing for .NET
11 comments
·August 18, 2025fabian2k
mikasjp
It is a thin abstraction over Channels, and that’s by design. What it adds is graceful shutdown handling, OpenTelemetry integration, timeout support, and simple configuration. I kept needing those pieces in almost every project, so wrapping them up into a small reusable library felt worthwhile.
bob1029
I'm trying to find the actual value-add here. This feels like TPL but with more steps.
Why do we need to serialize the jobs through a Channel<T>? Couldn't we just do Task.Run and let the runtime take care of scheduling our work?
rafaelmn
You have no control over concurrency/scheduling, have to manage scoping, error handling, etc. TPL/Threads add to much low level noise to the logic.
Like you could easily blow up the thread pool depending on what you are doing, where a channel based implementation would just deal with spillover and not affect the other threads. You can easily capture scoped services that are disposed by the time the thread executes - but you never catch it in dev because you get executed immediately and request takes long enough, etc.
Spawning threads will work but I can see the use in a small abstraction like this lib for sure. Not sure I would use a lib for this - would probably hand roll something since I don't like adding unvetted external deps by default.
mikasjp
This is exactly why I built BusyBee. My team found ourselves hand‑rolling something similar almost every time we started a new project. If we kept needing it, I figured there are probably more people in the same situation. So instead of duplicating the same background queue logic across multiple codebases, I decided to build it once, add proper OpenTelemetry support, and keep it simple without extra bloat. That way we can just reuse it and reduce the amount of similar code we have to maintain.
lloydatkinson
I wish TPL Dataflow was more known.
mikasjp
BusyBee is a high-performance .NET background processing library built on native channels. It provides a simple, configurable, and observable solution for handling background tasks with built-in OpenTelemetry support and flexible queue management.
amir734jj
How is it different from hangfire?
mikasjp
Hangfire is primarily a job scheduler. It is designed for running jobs at specific times or intervals, and it persists jobs in a database so they survive restarts. It comes with a dashboard, retries, and a lot of infrastructure around long‑term job management. That makes it powerful, but also heavier in terms of setup and overhead.
BusyBee is focused on lightweight background processing. Everything is in‑memory, with no external storage required. It is designed for scenarios where you want to enqueue a task and have it executed immediately in the background, without scheduling or persistence.
A practical example: if you are building an API that accepts file uploads and you want to process the file asynchronously after the request returns, BusyBee is a good fit. You just enqueue the job and it runs in the background right away. If instead you need to schedule a nightly cleanup job or ensure jobs survive application restarts, Hangfire would be the better choice.
This seems to be a thin abstraction over Channels, I'd probably prefer to use Channels directly in almost all cases.
I really like Channels for in-memory queues like this, they're very nice and it's easy to make everything parallel. But if you need more than this you usually need persistence, and then you need something else entirely.