in reply to what do you use for job queuing?

If I understand the topic correctly, you might want to consider the "trivial" solution of setting up a dispatch table in a database and running monitoring scripts on each machine in the cluster. Each monitor-script would check for new work to process in the database, and update the dispatch table with "in-progress" and "completed" flags as need be. Of course this only works when the individual pieces can easily be broken apart, but I think this is often true for web-applications.

-Tats

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Re^2: what do you use for job queuing?
by perrin (Chancellor) on Jun 04, 2004 at 16:15 UTC
    I did think about that, and still might try building one as an example app, but there are some tricky implementation details. For one thing, this could result in a whole lot of programs polling the database frequently. That's not going to scale all that well. We can reduce this by having a dispatcher process on each machine so that there's only one poller per machine, but then it has to handle talking to a bunch of child processes to give them jobs and get their results. (This is trickier than a typical server situation where the children just wait for the next connection to come in on some socket.) That can be done with things like IPC::Run or maybe POE, but it's not trivial.

    If I end up trying to build one, I will probably post some design ideas here for feedback.

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