Scheduling with gearman vs. cron?

Question

I have noticed a lot of people discussing Gearman and it's scheduling features making it enable to distribute work onto other servers. However, I have not yet seen a comparison to native cronjobs.

What are the differences between cron and Gearman?

Answer 1

If you're doing pure scheduling, using Gearman is unnecessary.

The main differences between Gearman and cron are that:

1. cron jobs are only triggered only based on time, while Gearman functions are triggered by calls by other applications.
2. Gearman is used for coordinating tasks between multiple systems, as you mentioned, while cron provides no synchronization. As a result, asynchronous tasks are better for cron, and vice versa.

Unless your application needs to farm out heavy-duty synchronous processing to other servers, I would recommend you to use cron and keep it simple.