gearman

When used in a cloud environment, you use the flexible nature of Gearman to ramp up the available workers when you need them.

If the version number matches that of the Gearman library you built and installed previously, your system is ready.

Assuming that you host your PHP applications on a typical LAMP configuration, Gearman requires an additional daemon and a PHP extension.

The easiest way to see how Gearman works is to try a simple application that makes use of the Gearman service.

To track the Gearman project, subscribe to its Google group, or visit its IRC channel, #gearman, on Freenode.

To run the other script, all you need are the Gearman libraries, script modules, and the script itself.

Using Gearman from PHP is similar to the previous example, except that you create the producer and consumer actors in PHP.

Future releases of Gearman will collect and report statistics, provide advanced monitoring, and cache job results, among other things.

Gearman takes a different approach by providing a flexible mechanism for distributing discrete tasks around a group of machines.

Gearman doesn't do any form of translation or manipulation of the data exchanged.

For the former, the Gearman work queue remains in memory but is backed by a relational database.

You create a Gearman Client object, specify the servers, and call the task that you want to perform.

So far, you have looked at ways of using Gearman where you want or need an immediate response.

This makes Gearman useful in grid environments or Web environments where you want to share and distribute work and requests.

A Gearman network, tying clients to workers, can take virtually any shape you can imagine.

The Gearman library for PHP distributes work among a collection of machines.

Run a worker with the command-line utility gearman.

Moreover, because the Gearman protocol is language and platform independent, you can mix programming languages in your solution.

You have a standard Gearman environment using your standard group of workers serving the needs of your clients.

News aggregator Digg has built a Gearman network of similar size to crunch 400, 000 jobs per day.

uses Gearman across 60 or more servers to process 6 million jobs per day.

Thus, if the Gearman daemon fails, it can recreate the work queue on restart.

For example, if you are providing or using Twitter integration, you can use Gearman to handle the posting to the Twitter account.

You can also verify a proper build and installation with a snippet of PHP code. Save this little application to verify_gearman. php

Deploying Gearman in dynamic environments

Using Gearman across environments

As mentioned earlier, a Gearman configuration has three kinds of actors