Gearman is a system to farm out work to other machines, dispatching function calls to machines that are better suited to do work, to do work in parallel, to load balance lots of function calls, or to call functions between languages. This is the server daemon component. The bridge between workers (clients who can do work) and callers (clients who want work done). You should run several of these, at least two, for both load balancing and high availability. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Gearman-Server/