Question

I need to use something to coordinate my system with several consumers/producers each running on different machines with different operating systems. I have been researching on using MySql to do this, but it seems ridiculously difficult.

My requirements are simple: I want to be able to add or remove consumers/producers at any time and thus they should not depend on each other at all. Naturally a database would separate the two nicely.

I have been looking at Q4M message queuing plugin for MySql but it seems complicated to use.

I really need some input on how to construct my system best possible.

Answer 1

I need to use something to coordinate
my system with several
consumers/producers each running on
different machines with different
operating systems

That’s a message queue. Do not pursue other alternatives. Everything else (i.e., using a database with insert and deletes) is dreadfully slow and cumbersome.

Building a large, slow message queue with a database often turns out badly in practice because (1) databases are slow, (2) databases are huge and complex, (3) you have locking and contention issues that make each transaction potentially slow, (4) it’s a lot more overhead than the problem deserves.

There are numerous message queue solutions.

If you can’t make Q4M work, you should move on to another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_queue

http://linux.die.net/man/7/mq_overview

http://qpid.apache.org/

http://code.google.com/p/httpsqs/