Question

Is it so memory consuming to have a daemon written on php (which listens/process a queue) comparing to crontab way of executing background tasks?

I have ~600 shops on one server under one engine. Some tasks shop-owner runs require a lot of time, so it is reasonable to fork them. Putting a task into cron works well, I just don’t like up to 59 sec delay of start (restriction of cron). So I’d like to try queue system. I’m just afraid it will force me to run 600 php threads to listen/process those queues (shops are from different customers, I can’t make a common daemon). Doesn’t it automatically require some 600-1000MB more memory, which is then not a good choice comparing to cron (which only loads a process if it was planned).

Answer 1

Instead of putting them into a cron with a 59-second delay, why not run them using the “at” daemon? You can simply use “at now” and they’ll run immediately. See, for example,:

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?at

I certainly wouldn’t consider running 600 threads in PHP as daemons simultaneously.