Gearman & PHP: Proper Way For a Worker to Send Back a Failure

This may not the be the best way to do it, but it is the method i have used in the past and it has worked well for me.

I use sendException() followed by sendFail() in the worker to return a job failure. The exception part is optional but i use it so the client can error and know roughly why it failed. After the sendFail I return nothing else. As an example this is a the method that the worker registers as the callback for doing work:

public function doJob(GearmanJob $job){    $this->_gearmanJob = $job;    try{        //This method does the actual work        $this->_doJob($job->functionName());    }    catch (Exception $e) {        $job->sendException($e->getMessage());        $job->sendFail();    }}

After sendFail() do not return anything else, otherwise you may get strange results such as the jobserver thinking the job ended ok.

As regards returning data, i use sendData() if i am returning data in chunks (such as streaming transcoded video, or any 'big' data where i don't want to move around one large blobs) at various intervals during my job with a sendComplete() at the end. Otherwise if I only want to return my data in one go at the end of the job I only use sendComplete().

Hope this helps.