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

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To clarify, Gearman is not meant to be used as a message queue, but instead it's a job server. The example in the post is an interesting use case (and convenient for us because we were already using it as a job server), but not really what it's designed for. I'll follow up with a post on how we use it to do work.

What is the difference between a job server and a message queue that requires a return queue?

Not much, but the Gearman default is to require a response. You can almost treat gearman like blocking unix pipes over tcp, mixed with a FIFO queue. In fact, it comes with commandline tools to do just that. You get the option of submitting a job without waiting for a response back too, though.

I suppose Gearman is more of an RPC broker with sync and async modes than an MQ, but the differences are mostly semantic.

Perhaps I'm getting hung up on the semantics. We use it more to farm out function calls, rather than passing content or delivering large messages. The one time I tried to use it for large amounts of data I did have issues with memory and latency.

For simple RPC-style use (millions per day) though, our server has been stable (no change in memory or latency) for months without a restart.

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