Difference between revisions of "Workers"

Revision as of 19:48, 1 January 2012

Workers are programs that don't run under control of Apache, because they handle tasks that don't need to happen synchronously to a user's request (whether triggered by one or not), or because running them under Apache would consume excessive resources.

Some workers process TheSchwartz or Gearman requests. Those normally run under control of worker-manager (see below). Some workers are manual, and depending on their purpose, can run either under control of worker-manager or be started by cron, or even just once when {re)starting the server. (Manual workers are a mixed lot, and there's no "one size fits all" option for them.)

Starting and stopping workers

Using worker-manager and workers.conf

bin/worker-manager takes care of starting, stopping, and restarting workers to maintain the numbers of workers set in etc/workers.conf for each host it runs on. The etc/workers.conf syntax is pretty straightforward and described in the file itself. To start bin/worker-manager for normal use (daemonized), use:

$LJHOME/bin/worker-manager

Or, if you want it to stay in the foreground and display progress/debug messages, use:

$LJHOME/bin/worker-manager --debug

In both cases, killing it will also kill the workers it started.

If you find that you do not want to use some workers (for testing, temporarily, or long-term), you may turn them off in the configuration. In /etc/workers.conf, setting the count to 0 will not start any of that worker. Commenting out the line on which that worker appears (with a #) will not start any of that worker. These are best for temporary changes. For a permanent change, you may also entirely remove the line on which that worker appears .

Individually

You can also start individual workers from the shell prompt, by typing:

$LJHOME/bin/worker/(worker-name)

Most workers accept the -v or --verbose flag to request extra debugging output and stay in the foreground when started from the shell prompt, so ^C should work to kill them.

Using cron or at server boot time

Please refer to your OS documentation. The crontab(1) and init(8) manpages are probably most relevant.

List of workers

Below is a list of all the workers in the $LJHOME/bin/worker directory.

Note: I probably got some of that wrong. Any corrections welcome, especially where I say "not sure".