Yes, my original design was to have gearman do this for me but the problem I've been facing is shared memory, communication between parent and child workers and blocking during a long running gearman worker process....
I wasn't sure how to create a manager/worker setup, all on the gearman worker side. I guess I could have the manager be a gearman worker and a gearman client at the same time. (Thoughts??).
Comment on Re^2: Parent/Child,Boss/Worker->IPC suggestions
Yeah, I advise you not to use shared memory. I'd keep state in a database, and use signals if you need to interrupt running processes to shut them down.