erq - Lightweight message queues in erlang.


Introduction/Background
=======================

erq is an attempt to clone Kestrel in Erlang.  Kestrel is a
lightweight message queue written in Scala by Robey Pointer at
twitter.  It is a clone of starling which was written in Ruby by
Blaine Cooke at twitter previously.  One nifty feature of Starling
(and therefore Kestrel (and therefore erq)) is that it shares an
interface with memcache, so that any platform that has a memcache
client (i.e. most) automatically have a client for accessing any of
these platforms.

You can find kestrel here:
http://github.com/robey/kestrel/tree/master

And starling here:
http://github.com/starling/starling/tree/master

I first became aware of Kestrel when it was posted to reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/80ip6/kestrel_twitters_new_message_queue_written_in/

The reddit thread links to this post by Robey Pointer, the author of Kestrel:
http://robey.lag.net/2008/11/27/scarling-to-kestrel.html


Motivation
==========

Between the posts and the README in github for Kestrel there seemed to
be a divide between people that were impressed with the throughput
and/or power-to-weight ratio of the code and those that were
thoroughly unimpressed.  I don't know much about this type of
software, having never written it before but my gut told me that
better performance should be easy to acheive and that the lines of
code seemed very high.  This project is an attempt to confirm my
suspicions while getting more familiar with Erlang.


Notes/TBContinued.. 
===================
mqueue - Memory queues.
pqueue - Persistent queues.