Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Gearman

76
144
+ 1
45
ZeroMQ

260
585
+ 1
71
Add tool

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.

Advice on Gearman and ZeroMQ
Meili Triantafyllidi
Software engineer at Digital Science · | 6 upvotes · 475.8K views
Needs advice
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQSRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
ZeroMQZeroMQ

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

See more
Replies (2)
Shishir Pandey
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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.

See more
Kevin Deyne
Principal Software Engineer at Accurate Background · | 5 upvotes · 216K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Gearman
Pros of ZeroMQ
  • 11
    Ease of use and very simple APIs
  • 11
    Free
  • 6
    Polyglot
  • 5
    No single point of failure
  • 3
    Scalable
  • 3
    High-throughput
  • 2
    Foreground & background processing
  • 2
    Very fast
  • 1
    Different Programming Languages Channel
  • 1
    Many supported programming languages
  • 23
    Fast
  • 20
    Lightweight
  • 11
    Transport agnostic
  • 7
    No broker required
  • 4
    Low level APIs are in C
  • 4
    Low latency
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Publish-Subscribe

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Gearman
Cons of ZeroMQ
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 5
      No message durability
    • 3
      Not a very reliable system - message delivery wise
    • 1
      M x N problem with M producers and N consumers

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Gearman?

    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.

    What is ZeroMQ?

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Gearman?
    What companies use ZeroMQ?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
    Learn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Gearman?
    What tools integrate with ZeroMQ?
    What are some alternatives to Gearman and ZeroMQ?
    RabbitMQ
    RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.
    Kafka
    Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
    Celery
    Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.
    Redis
    Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
    Beanstalkd
    Beanstalks's interface is generic, but was originally designed for reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running time-consuming tasks asynchronously.
    See all alternatives