There was a thought about the job queue that popped into my mind today.
From what I understand, for a Wiki Farm, in order to use runJobs.php instead of using the in-request queue (which on high traffic sites is less desireable) the Wiki Farm has to run runJobs.php periodically for each and every wiki on the farm. So, for example. If a Wiki Farm has 10,000 wiki it's hosting, say the Wiki Host really wants to ensure that the queue is run at least hourly to keep the data on the wiki reasonably up to date, the wiki farm essentially needs to call runJobs.php 10,000 times an hour (ie: one time for each individual wiki), irrelevantly of whether a wiki has jobs or not. Either that or poll each database before hand, which in itself is 10,000 database calls an hour plus the runJobs execution which still isn't that desireable.
What do people think of having another source class for the job queue like we have for file storage, text storage, etc...
The idea being that Wiki Farms would have the ability to implement a new Job Queue source which instead derives jobs from a single shared database with the same structure as the normal job queue, but with a farm specific wiki id inside the table as well. Using this method a Wiki Farm would be able to set up a cron job (or perhaps a daemon to be even more effective at dispatching the job queue runs) which instead of making 10,000 calls to runJobs outright, it would fetch a random job row from the shared job queue table, look at the wiki id inside the row and execute a runJobs (perhaps with a limit=1000) script for that wiki to dispatch the queue and run some jobs for that wiki. It would of course continue looking at random jobs from the shared table and dispatching more runJobs executions serving the role of trying to keep the job queues running for all wiki on the farm, but without making wasteful runJobs calls for a pile of wikis which have no jobs to run.
Any comments?