Matthew Wells has a new post that looks at combining Kohana and Gearman to create a system to handle large data processing without slowing down the rest of the application.

A commonly identified bottleneck arises when dealing with large, 'expensive' data. This is commonly seen when an application posts a large volume of well structured data to the API (that some process must be carried out upon), before some form of structured receipt is then returned as a request response. [...] Analysing such a request tends to show high PHP CPU usage with lower database consumption. [...] The structured nature of data exchanged via an API means that we can, relatively simply and reliably, divide the submitted data and process it simultaneously with the help of a great tool called Gearman.

He walks you through the entire process including his initial thoughts on what the system should be and how it should behave when the requests are made. He shares the code he used to implement the system - a simple worker that processes part of the request and returns the results. The command-line calls to run the worker manually for testing are also included.