Introduction
The Fat Controller is a parallel execution handler, used to repeatedly run other programs, usually scripts, a bit like CRON. It was designed to handle the execution of scripts which perform background processing for websites which generally need to repeat, react to how much work there is to do at any one time or run as a daemon. The Fat Controller takes care of all these boring concerns so you can concentrate on your business logic.
- Daemonise anything - give it any PHP, Python, whatever script, even a Java application and it can be daemonised into a background process.
- Multitask anything - can run many instances of any script/program in parallel. It even supports feedback so scripts which process batches of data can say if more instances must be run (i.e. lots more data still to be processed) or if there is no more data and therefore no need to run the script for some time.
- Repeat anything - any script can be rerun once it finishes executing. You can also specify an interval so that it will wait x seconds before restarting. Unlike CRON it waits x seconds after a script finishes before restarting, CRON will wait x minutes after a script starts so there is a potential that could end up wth multiple instance of a script running at once. Alternatively, it can work just like CRON starting instances at regular intervals but unlike CRON, you can specify the interval in seconds.
The Fat Controller is written in C, is very stable and used to running for months or years on end without interruption. It is also under intensive, active development.