As far as I can tell, right now Gearman is only a load balancer for small requests using a nonstandard RPC protocol. It's easy to be smaller when you don't yet

As far as I can tell, right now Gearman is only a load balancer for small requests using a nonstandard RPC protocol. It's easy to be smaller when you don't yet have most of hadoop's major features: * use the whole cluster for large jobs, consuming all the data right where it's stored and combining output from every machine you own (what's the point of remote work on just one box?) * retry partial failures on different replicas of the same data (without losing successful work) * ship intermediate values between workers (without this you don't even have map/reduce) * roll new code and data beforehand (and clean it up after) * avoid job starvation