It's been said before, but good judgement comes with experience, but experience comes from bad judgement We all know the golden rules on database backups: 1. do backups 2. test that you can restore from those backups But how many of us actually do that second part? I've recently gained some experience (ahem!) on the importance of step 2.

We've been using the excellent Gearman in our production systems to handle distributed job processing, and it's been working very well for us. However, just occasionally it will throw a weird one our way.