Gearman is especially handy if you expose your application to it. I've got a wrapper that allows the app to push any function call out to the workers for async

Gearman is especially handy if you expose your application to it. I've got a wrapper that allows the app to push any function call out to the workers for async handling. So your image processing (or whatever heavy/blocking task) can be dispatched from within your standard libraries without having to maintain a separate set of code.