What I understand (very little) from this post is that 37Signals, the company behind Basecamp, Campfire and the Rails framework has commissioned Dutch development firm Phusion, an IT company based in The Netherlands, to develop ‘global queuing’ for Passenger. Passenger is Phusion’s product.
This is interesting because usually when we talk about outsourcing we think about low wages countries like India or Eastern European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic. Of course this is different because 37Signals merely wanted an extra feature for this product. What IS cool too is that 37Signals liked Passenger enough to ask Phusion to add some features they were missing and are endorsing this product by running some of their products on Passenger.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about Passenger and global queing to tell you how cool this really is. Lets do a little crowdsourcing, before I embarrass myself, and have people explain to me, and the rest of our readers, how cool it is to ‘queue globally’…
Serial entrepreneur and founder of V3 Redirect Services (sold), HubHop Wireless Internet Provider (sold), TwitterCounter.com, PressDoc & The Next Web. Boris is very active on Twitter and would love it if you started following him @Boris.
Say you have five instances that handle your requests. A global queue gives an incoming request to the first available handler.
A non-global queue balances requests between all the instances. If one of the instances has a long-running request, it stalls the other requests that it has been assigned.
So, a global queue usually gives you better overall response times.
Yeah, I knew that!
;-)
In more humanly language: ;-)
Imagine a post-office with multiple front-desks. There are a lot of people waiting. With global queuing turned off (the ‘old’ way) you will be directed to the desk with the smallest amount of people in the queue. All the desks have queues in this scenario.
With global queuing turned on there is only 1 queue for all the desks. The big advantage of this is that you don’t have to stand in the queue with the old lady in front of you and have to wait forever for your turn.
@Reiner, that’s a great explanation. Thank you.
Hmm…are you sure that dutch company doesn’t re-outsource the work to Eastern Europe or India :)?