You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.
Wednesday, May 27
Unicode
Glitchr explains Unicode.
Glitchr explains Unicode.
Ben Frederickson explains Unicode.
Ai Shinozaki explains Unicode.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:47 AM
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Sunday, May 24
So I Was Wondering
Note to self: Implement auto-save, dammit.
Note to self: Implement auto-save, dammit.
I already knew that LMDB supported multiple values per key. Reading the docs last week, I noticed that values within a key were stored in sorted order. This evening, I was wondering if it were possible to seek to a particular value within a key.
It is.
This is neat. It means you can use LMDB as an engine to implement a two-dimensional database like Cassandra, or a data structure server like Redis, with the elements of lists, sets, and hashes individually addressable.
Plus the advantage that unlike Redis, it can live on disk and have B-tree indexes rather than just a hash table. (Though of course Redis has the advantage of predictable performance - living in memory and accessed directly, it's very consistent.)
The other big advantage of LMDB (for me, anyway) is that it natively supports multiple processes - not just multiple threads, but independent processes - handling transactions and locking automatically. I love Python, but it has what is known as the Global Interpreter Lock - while you can have many threads, only one of them can be executing Python code at any time. The other threads can be handling I/O, or calling C libraries that don't access shared data, but can't actually be running your code at the same time.
That puts a limit on the performance of any single Python application, and breaking out into multiple processes means you need to find a way to share data between those processes, which is a lot more fiddly than it is with threads.
LMDB don't care. Thread, process, all the same, just works.
Neat.
It does have limitations - it's a single-writer/multiple-reader design, so it will only scale so far unless you implement some sort of sharding scheme on top of it. But I've clocked it at 100,000 transactions per second, and a million bulk writes per second, so it's not bad at all.
Admittedly that was with the write safety settings disabled, so server crash could have corrupted my database. But my main use for LMDB is as a smart distributed data structure cache, so if one node dies it can just be flushed and restarted. In practical use, as a robust database, the numbers are somewhat lower (though with a smart RAID controller you should still be able to do pretty well).
It also supports a rather nice hot backup facility, where the backup format is either a working LMDB database ready to go (without needing to restore) or a cdbmake format backup (which is plain text if you're using JSON for keys and values), and it can back up around 1GB per second - if you have the I/O bandwidth - and only about 20% slower if the database is in heavy use at the time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:08 AM
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Friday, May 22
A Few Of My Favourite Things
Once I got past the segfaults, anyway. You should be using these things.
Once I got past the segfaults, anyway. You should be using these things.
MongoDB 3.0 (not earlier versions, though)
Elasticsearch (though their approach to security is remarkably ass-backwards)
LZ4 (and its friend, LZ4_HC)
LMDB and its magical set_range_dup
Ai Shinozaki
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:10 PM
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Wednesday, May 13
Some Pig
So, I'm tinkering with what will become Minx 1.2, and testing various stuff, and I'm pretty happy with the performance.
So, I'm tinkering with what will become Minx 1.2, and testing various stuff, and I'm pretty happy with the performance.
Then I run the numbers, and realise that I'm flooding a 10GbE connection with HTTP requests using a $15 cloud server.
I think we can count that part of the problem space as solved.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:30 PM
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Hard Things
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:27 AM
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Tuesday, May 12
That'll Do
I was getting about 1000 random record reads per second.
I was getting about 1000 random record reads per second.
I needed to achieve 10,000 reads per second to make things work.
I wanted to reach 100,000 reads per second to make things run nicely.
I'm currently at 1,000,000.*
That'll do.
* Best test run so far was ~1.6 million records per second, with some special-case optimisations.** Without optimisations, around 300k. Per thread.
** Since you asked, the problem was with unpacking large cached records into native objects. A common case in templates is that you only want to access one or two fields in a record - perhaps just the user's name - but unless the record is already a native object you need to load the external representation and parse it to find the field you need. The solution was to keep an immutable version of the of the object in the process, sign it with SHA-256, and sign the matching cache entry. Then, when we need to access the record, we can read the binary data from the cache, compare the signatures, and if they match, we're safe to continue using the existing native structure. If they don't match, we take the payload, decrypt it (if encryption is enabled) check that the decrypted payload matches the signature (if not, something is badly wrong), uncompress the payload (if compression is enabled), parse it (MsgPack or JSON), instantiate a new object, freeze it, and put it back into the native object cache. This can take as long as 20 microseconds.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:53 PM
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