Best architecture

[Matt Sergeant]

Our current gearman setup doesn't seem to be efficiently using all  
resources available.

We're using it inside qpsmtpd to scan emails (which is slow). Mostly  
it works fine, but we wish it used more resources.

Our current architecture is as follows:

BEGIN
4 mail servers running qpsmtpd and scan workers (a simple forking  
server for the workers).

Gearmand running on a "monitor" server and another "spare" server,  
and also on every mail server. I argued against this setup but  
anything else caused too many timeouts.

Workers also run on "monitor" and "spare".

Workers and clients on the mail servers connect to the same  
gearmand's: localhost, monitor, spare.

Workers on "monitor" and "spare" connect to gearmand on localhost only.
END

Yes it's horrible, and I didn't design it. The ops guy just tried  
running things a few different places until he got something that  
kinda worked - I guess that's the beauty of gearman is that you can  
just bring servers into action wherever and it just keeps running.

So suggestions of better architectures would be welcome.

What's the reason for having clients talk to multiple gearmand's? In  
my original plan I was going to just have gearmand on "monitor" and  
distribute work to all the workers, but that didn't seem to scale  
very well (we're scanning about 90 mails/sec).

Matt.

PS: First Post!!!