Ask HN: What do you think of our demo website?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291052

by shin_lao • 16 years ago

9 30 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi HN!

We're working hard on our very own high-performance cache engine.

As a proof of concept/demo/test, we built an URL shortener service built around it.

The URL of the demo server is http://wrp.me/

What do you think about it? Especially, what do you think of the speed?

More generally speaking, would you be interested (read: ready to pay for) a high performance cache or this need is just the fruit of our imagination?

pedalpete• 16 years ago

I like the look of the site, and I found it to be quite speedy as well.

I use memcache on one of my sites, and never found the need for anything else.

Clearly, you felt there was an opportunity in that space, and maybe there is. But to me it wasn't obvious.

That may be a bit of a stepping stone. you're like memcache but...!

I don't know that 'faster' is the main target (though I could be wrong). Lots of sites seem to be quite happy with memcache. But if you can show a savings of x over memcache due to server resources or speed, etc. you might be on to something.

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

That's our thoughts, if you read my other replies to the comment I list what I believe we offer compared to memcached and equivalent products.

ionrock• 16 years ago

I think the speed is always a feature, but at the same time, caching always feels more interesting in terms of a proxy. For example, where I work, we're able to use one server and proxy massive amounts of traffic to a cluster of services. I know we paid for this tool and it has proved to be worth the money. That said, it does a great deal more than just caching where even if there were a faster caching solution, I'm not sure it would be worth paying for.

I hope that makes sense since simply stating "there are already those kinds of programs available" does mean that there isn't room for improvement. The evolution of lighttpd, nginx and cherokee all suggest that people found apache limiting in some way.

As for the service it did feel pretty darn fast, so kudos for that. More use cases or a more general caching proxy/load balancer might be something more people could consider worth paying for but that is just my own thought.

Good luck!

akirk2• 16 years ago

It sounds like you keep the URLs in memory. What do you do if the power goes out?

crescendo• 16 years ago

From the FAQ:

wrpme is an ultra fast _persistent_ cache engine

akirk2• 16 years ago

Also from the FAQ:

How long is a wrpme URL valid? An URL is valid - at least - thirty (30) days from its last access. In other words, an URL will be kept alive as long as it's acceded once every thirty (30) days .

If it is persistent I wonder why they have this rule. Just to save RAM?

vyrotek• 16 years ago

Does it only work on a single machine? Or can it be used distributed across multiple servers?

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

It currently only works on a single machine but we will implement consistent hashing soon.

taykh• 16 years ago

clickable link: http://wrp.me/

carbocation• 16 years ago

From your FAQ:

"Will wrpme be open source?

No, users will need to purchase a license to use the software except for evaluation and educational purposes."

Sounds like you guys must have done something pretty impressive to warrant such a statement! Can you tell us a bit about what differentiates your offering enough from memcached? Are performance comparisons available?

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

Yes, we're much faster but I don't want to commit any benchmark yet, we want to be 100% sure.

motvbi• 16 years ago

It would be hard to pay for something that I know very little about. There isn't much information about the cache engine itself on your website. How does this compare with memcached? Numbers on the performance would give us more insight.

olegkikin• 16 years ago

Boring. There are hundreds of sites like that already.

I also tried submitting the same URL over and over again, and I get new shortened URLs. Seems like a waste.

http://wrp.me/99Jaa

http://wrp.me/99Maa

http://wrp.me/99Oaa

danieldon• 16 years ago

Links above go to test.com

FYI: http://www.example.com (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt)

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

Actually, in memory, you have only one instance. But several keys, granted. We'll fix that.

moe3• 16 years ago

would you be interested (read: ready to pay for) a high performance cache or this need is just the fruit of our imagination?

You mean instead of just using memcached, redis, varnish or squid? All of which are peer reviewed, battle tested, free, and optimized to perform about as close to the metal as it gets?

Sorry, but I'd lean towards "fruit of your imagination".

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

Well, compared to all the products you named we're...

- faster

- designed for 64-bit from the ground up

- scalable on multi core machines

- portable - Windows, Linux, FreeBSD - out of the box

- persistent out of the box

- very easy to install and deploy (ok memcached is very easy to install and deploy as well)

- secure by default

- come with support

Redis, varnish and squid aren't really equivalent products. Memcacheddb is our closest equivalent.

What do you think?

Of course we're very keen on hearing more from you as we will offer a beta for download.

donw2• 16 years ago

I'm going to be honest, and say that I've probably got no use for your product. Memcache is plenty fast enough (200k ops/sec without tuning) for our needs, is open-source, well-tested, free, and has bindings for a lot of different platforms.

That said, you may want to look at the Windows market, as they don't have a native memcached, so that might give you some leverage.

Windows shops are also more likely to spend money.

I also read your FAQ, and it left me with a lot of questions:

You claim to be faster than memcached, but don't provide any benchmarks to back those claims up.

What evidence do you have to support your scalability claims?

What language bindings do you offer?

What do you mean by 'secure by default'?

moe3• 16 years ago

Well, what practical problem are you solving?

All of them (except squid) are pretty trivial to deploy and have gone through years of optimization. It's a bit hard to believe you could beat them on performance by a margin large enough to make it worth paying money for.

Have benchmarks?

kylebragger• 16 years ago

I'm curious how this will stack up against free, open-source libraries such as memcache and redis.

javery2• 16 years ago

How is this better than redis? I can't imagine needing something higher performance than redis, especially if I had to pay for it and it was closed source.

shin_lao10• 16 years ago

Actually Redis is probably better than our product when it comes to "database" features. Redis offers semantics we don't offer, if I'm correct with redis you can get list of objects and the like. We're lower level than that, we focused on one thing: speed and scalability.

javery2• 16 years ago

So you are faster than Redis? Can you back that up?

wicknicks• 16 years ago

Looks nice. If I try and shorten the URL "http://wrp.me/, it actually enlarges it to "http://wrp.me/999Ea.

Ask HN: What do you think of our demo website?

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