Do You Queue? An introduction to the Zend Server Job Queue

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. When talking about building a scalable application queuing is a concept that many PHP developers are not overly familiar with. In this talk we will demonstrate how you can use some generic principles, implemented in the Zend Server Job Queue to help scale your application.

Transcript

1. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Do you queue?
   An introduction to the Zend Server
   Job Queue
   Slavey Karadzhov
   Senior Consultant
   Zend Technologies
   Credits: Eric Ritchie, Kevin Schroeder
   

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2. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   About me
   • Senior Technical Consultant and Trainer
   at Zend Technologies
   • Zend Framework and PHP 5.3 ZCE
   • Many years of PHP (v3,4 & 5), ZF 1 and galaxy of
   programming languages (Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript,…).
   • Hobbies: Travelling, sampling exotic dishes, outdoor sports,
   testing hype technologies.
   (in no particular order)
   2
   

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3. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Agenda
   • Asynchronous operations in PHP
   • Performance and Scalability
   • Zend Server Job Queue
   • Benchmarks
   • Use Cases
   • Implementation with Zend Server Job Queue
   • Questions & Answers
   3
   

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4. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Asynchronous operations in PHP
   Meaning and implications
   

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5. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Asynchronous operations in PHP
   • PHP is a sequential language
    Step by step execution (synchronous)
    Time consuming tasks delay the complete execution
    Pro: Simplicity
    Con: Performance and scalability issues
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6. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Asynchronous operations in PHP
   Could your PHP apps benefit from being able to
   process data or execute asynchronously?
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7. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Asynchronous operations in PHP
   • Why would you want to use them?
    Performance
   • Execute logic apart from the main request
    Scalability
   • The ability to handle non-immediate logic as resources are available
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8. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Performance & Scalability
   

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9. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
   Performance & Scalability
   • Performance is the speed by which a request is executed
   • Scalability is the ability of that request to maintain its
   performance as load/infrastructure increases
   Scalability can be improved by better
   performance
   but they are not the same
   9
   

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10. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Performance & Scalability
    • Improving the performance can mean
     Make the PHP run faster
     Make the PHP use less resources (hardware, network bandwidth )
    • Improving the scalability can mean
     Be able to handle more users
     Be able to handle more data
     Be able to handle more operations
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11. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Performance & Scalability
    • What helps make software scalable?
     Defined tasks
     Loose coupling
     Resource discovery
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12. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
    

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13. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
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14. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
    • Facilitates the PHP developers in executing asynchronous
    tasks
    • Benefits
     Reduce application bottlenecks
     Improve the end-user experience
     Intelligently distribute load across multiple servers
     Appropriately schedule non-time-sensitive tasks
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15. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
    • Perfect integration with
     Management
     Monitoring
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16. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Demonstration >>
    

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17. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
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18. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
    • Put certain tasks into a separate execution queue
     Off-load to new process (or defer to a later time)
     Off-load to a different server
    • Schedule jobs in the future
     Distribute processing load to off-hours
    • Set recurring jobs
    • Execute immediately, as resources are available
    • Utilize ZendJobQueue()
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19. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Zend Server Job Queue
    • Jobs are created using the createHttpJob() method
    • Pass parameters
     Simple ones, via query string $_GET
     Complex ones, as an associative array of key => value pairs
    • Set job options
     Name, priority, schedule, etc.
     Create deferred or recurring jobs
    • •Or… create from the UI
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20. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Benchmarks
    Why using Zend Job Queue matters?
    

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21. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Benchmarks
    • Sending Emails
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22. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Benchmarks
    • Image conversion using ImageMagick
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23. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Use Cases
    In which situations you can get the most of out of Zend Server Job
    Queue
    

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24. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Use Cases
    • Pre-caching data
    • Data analysis
    • Data processing
    • Pre-calculating (preparing data for the next request)
    Data is “out of date” once it leaves the web server
    Immediacy is seldom necessary
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25. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Implementation with Zend Server
    Job Queue
    The time for coding comes …
    

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26. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Implementation with Zend Server Job Queue
    • Execute single job
    • Execute recurring job
    • Execute job on all Zend Server clustered nodes
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27. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Thanks you!
    And now time for questions.
    Or write me at slavey@zend.com
    

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28. © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
    Follow us!
     http://www.facebook.com/ZendTechnologies
     http://twitter.com/zend
    

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