Yes as I pointed out you don't want this if you're doing NFS. Personally I prefer something like a MySQL table with GET_LOCK() to process things instead of NFS

Yes as I pointed out you don't want this if you're doing NFS. Personally I prefer something like a MySQL table with GET_LOCK() to process things instead of NFS if I need multiple machines. It gives you flock() like semantics in that if a machine or client goes away the GET_LOCK() is automatically freed, i.e. it survives as long as the connection to the database survives. Not having to deal with stale locks generally sucks way less than the extra overhead of a database. For any NFS-based scenario you usually end up creating a "task" "task.underway" and "task.done" files as locks, and re-enqueuing tasks if you have a "underway" file that's too old without a "done" file. You'd do the same with a MySQL table that you GET_LOCK() on, except you can safely re-enqueue "underway" tasks if you acquire the lock on them, since you know their consumers have gone away.