Using Gearman For Distributed Alerts

http://tech.backtype.com/using-gearman-for-distributed-alerts

by omakase • 17 years ago

14 13 17 years ago

tech.backtype.com

kvogt• 17 years ago

I would be very careful with gearman.

We tested it at Justin.tv and managed to cause the main process (gearmand) to spin at 100%, stop accepting connections, and lots of other things. Not quite ready for production use, especially if you need persistence and use the memcached plugin.

Also, the python client library is in pretty rough form. Our developers submitted a patch or two, but it still doesn't reliably handle errors, network outages, failover, or reconnects. You probably want all of these things in your job server of choice.

shib71• 17 years ago

What did you end up using instead?

kd5bjo2• 17 years ago

We're in the process of migrating to RabbitMQ. It looks pretty good, but we haven't really put it through its paces yet.

bretthoerner• 17 years ago

Perl or C server?

omakase4• 17 years ago

Are you now using Beanstalkd instead?

What kinds of jobs were you submitting? I've also run into problems using the python client handling errors, failover, and reconnects. But no issues with the C API, processing about 5 million jobs a day.

gstar2• 17 years ago

We used the C gearman server from gearman.org, and it was highly unstable and very slow (added an extra 10-100ms to a job, which was noticeable in the UI), and did other crazy things like return data from other jobs when the frequency got too high.

We've since moved to the original Danga Perl daemon (rather than invest time switching message queues), and it's faster, uses less memory, and more stable.

Next step is to move to a different MQ. In our application we don't need persistence especially, so I'm thinking zeromq.

moe2• 17 years ago

I'm sure I must be missing obvious here but why are they not just pushing those mails out directly?

All that gearman buys them here is... a longer delay until the mail is actually sent.

omakase4• 17 years ago

You're right, it does increase the delay. It's more of an example of how Gearman can be used.

Also, I _hate_ the idea of running an MTA on 30 machines that shouldn't be sending mail.

moe2• 17 years ago

Yup and a good sized one at that, working snippets are always welcome. I was just a bit confused due to the contrived use-case.

I don't share your concerns about the MTA (they are lightweight and it's usually helpful to know that sending mails won't block) but to each their own.

Using Gearman For Distributed Alerts

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