I've previously used Gearman along with supervisor to manage jobs.
In this case we are using Amazon SQS which I have spent some time trying to get my head around.
I have set up a separate micro instance from our main webserver to use as an Image processing server (purely for testing at the moment, it will be upgraded and become part of a cluster before this implementation goes live)
On this micro instance I have installed PHP and ImageMagick in order to perform the image processing.
I have also written a worker script which receives the messages from Amazon SQS.
All works perfectly, however I need this script to run over and over again in order to continuously check for messages.
I don't like the thought of running a continuous loop so have started to look at other methods with little success.
So my question is what is generally considered the best practice way to do this?
I am worried about memory since PHP wasn't really designed for this, therefore it feels like running the script for a while, then stopping and restarting it might be my best bet.
I have experience using supervisor (to ensure that gearman workers kept running) and am wondering if I could simply use that to continuously execute the simple php script over and over?
My thoughts are as follows:
- Set up SQS long polling so that the script checks for 20 seconds.
- Use a while loop with a 20 second sleep to keep this script running for say an hour at a time
- Have all this run through supervisor. When the hour is up and the loop is complete, allow the script to exit.
- Supervisor should then automatically restart it
Does this sound viable? Is there a better way? What is generally considered the best practice for receiving SQS messages in PHP?
Thanks in advance