poe and amqp/rabbitmq as a worker manager

[Kevin Goess]

We currently use rabbitmq for message between our web application and
asynchronous workers. The worker management is somewhat ad hoc, and we're
looking for a way to get a better handle on them.

It looks like POE has the components that I want, so it's finally time for
me to learn about POE. But there's an awful lot of POE material out there,
and I'm afraid if I try to digest it all I'll have made a lot of false
starts before I find the right path. Can anybody tell me if I'm going in
the right direction, or if there's already something out there that does
this?

I think I want to use POE as a job server driven by the AMQP POE client,
with workers in separate child processes handled by something like
POE::Component::Daemon (which has a scoreboard) or POE::Wheel::Run.

I'd like to be able to query the server on a management port with questions
like

- How many messages per queue are you receiving
- What's the completion time for jobs on each queue
- How idle/busy are your child workers?

It should be able to take commands like "add or drop these queues", and it
should automatically take care of tasks like making sure no queue is being
starved in favor of another queue.

Is this the right idea? Is there a general direction for this that would be
obvious to sketch out that would save me having to understand every example
in the poe cookbook?

Any pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!

[S Chaitanya]

Great question, Kevin. I'm looking for an answer to the same question!