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Gearman vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?
Developers describe Gearman as "A generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes". Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. On the other hand, ZeroMQ is detailed as "Fast, lightweight messaging library that allows you to design complex communication system without much effort". The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.
Gearman and ZeroMQ can be categorized as "Message Queue" tools.
Some of the features offered by Gearman are:
- Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD
- Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another
- Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce
On the other hand, ZeroMQ provides the following key features:
- Connect your code in any language, on any platform.
- Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, TPIC, multicast.
- Smart patterns like pub-sub, push-pull, and router-dealer.
"Free" is the top reason why over 10 developers like Gearman, while over 17 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing ZeroMQ.
ZeroMQ is an open source tool with 5.33K GitHub stars and 1.57K GitHub forks. Here's a link to ZeroMQ's open source repository on GitHub.
Binary.com, GrowSumo, and Runbook are some of the popular companies that use ZeroMQ, whereas Gearman is used by Instagram, Hootsuite, and Grooveshark. ZeroMQ has a broader approval, being mentioned in 35 company stacks & 12 developers stacks; compared to Gearman, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to: * Not loose messages in services outages * Safely restart service without losing messages (ZeroMQ seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)
Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?
Thank you for your time
ZeroMQ is fast but you need to build build reliability yourself. There are a number of patterns described in the zeromq guide. I have used RabbitMQ before which gives lot of functionality out of the box, you can probably use the worker queues example from the tutorial, it can also persists messages in the queue.
I haven't used Amazon SQS before. Another tool you could use is Kafka.
Both would do the trick, but there are some nuances. We work with both.
From the sound of it, your main focus is "not losing messages". In that case, I would go with RabbitMQ with a high availability policy (ha-mode=all) and a main/retry/error queue pattern.
Push messages to an exchange, which sends them to the main queue. If an error occurs, push the errored out message to the retry exchange, which forwards it to the retry queue. Give the retry queue a x-message-ttl and set the main exchange as a dead-letter-exchange. If your message has been retried several times, push it to the error exchange, where the message can remain until someone has time to look at it.
This is a very useful and resilient pattern that allows you to never lose messages. With the high availability policy, you make sure that if one of your rabbitmq nodes dies, another can take over and messages are already mirrored to it.
This is not really possible with SQS, because SQS is a lot more focused on throughput and scaling. Combined with SNS it can do interesting things like deduplication of messages and such. That said, one thing core to its design is that messages have a maximum retention time. The idea is that a message that has stayed in an SQS queue for a while serves no more purpose after a while, so it gets removed - so as to not block up any listener resources for a long time. You can also set up a DLQ here, but these similarly do not hold onto messages forever. Since you seem to depend on messages surviving at all cost, I would suggest that the scaling/throughput benefit of SQS does not outweigh the difference in approach to messages there.
Pros of Gearman
- Ease of use and very simple APIs11
- Free11
- Polyglot6
- No single point of failure5
- Scalable3
- High-throughput3
- Foreground & background processing2
- Very fast2
- Different Programming Languages Channel1
- Many supported programming languages1
Pros of ZeroMQ
- Fast23
- Lightweight20
- Transport agnostic11
- No broker required7
- Low level APIs are in C4
- Low latency4
- Open source1
- Publish-Subscribe1
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Cons of Gearman
Cons of ZeroMQ
- No message durability5
- Not a very reliable system - message delivery wise3
- M x N problem with M producers and N consumers1
