Skip to Content
Expert PHP and MySQL®
book

Expert PHP and MySQL®

by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford, Patrick Galbraith
March 2010
Intermediate to advanced
622 pages
15h 16m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Expert PHP and MySQL®

Chapter 10. Multi-tasking in PHP and MySQL

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

  • Efficiently multi-tasking in PHP

  • Using Gearman to multi-task and farm out work

  • Seeing an application put Gearman and various other components discussed in this book together to build a search application

How many times have you developed a web application that has some functionality which requires running an external program or even forking a separate process? This is not something you generally like to do from your web application because you want to make it run as fast and efficiently as possible, yet you want to provide a lot of functionality for end users. Thus the problem arises of how to get a fast but full-featured application that can process as much as possible.

GEARMAN

Many years ago (in the Internet time line) a web site, livejournal.com, was facing a similar dilemma. Users were uploading so many pictures to the web site that had to be processed into their respective accounts. This included resizing functionality such as creating thumbnails or reducing the raw image size to something more appropriate for the web site to display. These pictures mostly consisted of kittens — millions of pictures of kittens — overloading the web application that is Livejournal. Then the creative mind of Brad Fitzpatrick formulated a great idea to deal with this overload: have a server that spawns processes that do things such as processing pictures of kittens, outside of the web server application. Thus came the advent of Gearman. ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Jump Start PHP Environment

Jump Start PHP Environment

Bruno Skvorc
PHP 7 Programming Blueprints

PHP 7 Programming Blueprints

Jose Palala, Martin Helmich

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470563120Purchase book