Distributing Work with Gearman and Perl
I’ve been playing with Gearman over the past few weeks and I’m impressed by how little friction there is between the idea of distributing work across machines and actually making it happen. The Perl module, Gearman::Client and Gearman::Worker, is straightforward enough that you can have a client and a worker talking to each other through a job server in under an hour. The basic model is simple. You have a client that submits jobs, a worker that performs them, and a job server sitting in the middle dispatching work to whichever worker is free. The client and worker can be written in different languages, run on different machines, and you don’t need to worry about the networking yourself — Gearman handles all of that through TCP sockets to the job server. ...