Chapter 9. Multithreaded and Distributed Computing with pthreads and Gearman

We've spent quite some time with pthreads in the previous chapter. However, we haven't seen them used in any practical applications. That's what we're going to do in this chapter where we'll wrap pthreads with RxPHP to hide their internal implementation details and to make thread pools easily reusable in any RxPHP application.

Apart from pthreads, we'll take a look at distributing jobs across multiple workers locally or on multiple machines. We'll use the Gearman framework and its PHP bindings to make the same application as we'll do with pthreads, just instead of running it in multiple threads we'll use multiple workers (independent processes).

In this chapter, we're going to write an extendable code quality tool to test various style checks in PHP scripts. For example, this can be not using assignments in conditions, or just variable names following certain coding standard. PHP projects tend to grow very large these...