How can I stop active record callbacks from throwing an error when they fail?

I have a Rails app that includes some after_save active record callbacks, which are responsible for updating a second cache database.

Recently I was having some load issues and the second database was slow to respond or refusing connections, and my users started getting 500 errors when they tried to save objects.

I think this was down to me misunderstanding how callbacks work - I assumed that by making these after_save rather than before_save, the user was "safe" and if the callback failed, that would be graceful and silent.

How might I refactor my code to stop this behaviour and avoid exposing my users to error messages when these callbacks fail?

I've looked at refactoring the callbacks to simply trigger an active job, like this:

# models/mymodel.rbafter_save :update_indexdef update_index    UpdateIndexJob.perform_later(self)end

The active job includes the logic for actually updating the second cache database.

I'm not sure whether I would also need to implement sidekiq and redis for this to work.

I've also read about rails observers, which apparently work similar to callbacks but don't break the request-response cycle when they fail.