TwitPic Fetcher ================= Since the arrival of Google+, I wanted to get my pictures (2 years worth of simple snaps) from twitpic, and import them into Google+. Sadly, there was no easy way to export the images to zip or other format, so I took matters in my own hands, and decided to create a script that fetches my twitpic and saves them to filestorage. a few images ================= I had a total of 172 pictures on twitpic that needed to be downloaded individualy to my harddisk. Not a gigantic ammount, but still, it would take a lot of patience from me to fetch them one by one. That's something I don't have, so I started to research options to run them parallel. hi gearman ;] ================= I found gearman! A job queue server, that handles jobs using workers. Installing it was easy (followed lorna's guide at http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2011/Installing-Gearman-for-PHP-and-Ubuntu thanks!) and soon I was expirimenting, using the docs and guides online. The result? 172 images in 40 seconds ================= That is 180 external HTTP calls (including the paging the Twitpic api uses) in 40 seconds, or 4.5 calls / second. Not bad! meh, it's still slow ================= I know right?! I will try to update the code and add improvements over the course of time. Fixes / additions are welcome!