New from the Ibuildings techPortal today, there's a tutorial from Michael Davey looking at using Gearman with Magento to do some of the "heavy lifting" of queuing jobs from inside the tool.

With most web applications, there comes a time where there is a need to perform either CPU or I/O intensive work based on user actions. Whether processing uploaded files, or performing system-wide database updates, developers are increasingly turning to Gearman as a simple way to hand off the heavy lifting to another server to be performed asynchronously.

He's created a basic module that can be downloaded and dropped right into your Magento install to make it work with your Gearman queues. He includes an installation guide and a bit of code on how to make a sample job to run an event and the class sitting on the other side for the worker to use in handling it.