Littlest database that could

http://run-node.com/littlest-database-that-could/

by dpweb • 12 years ago

16 8 12 years ago

Hah, nice. But I do not see support for any form of escaping the semicolon, which might happen sooner or later with arbitrary data.

jchrisa• 12 years ago

JSON on the wire would clean that up.

aashishkoirala• 12 years ago

What you have here is a rudimentary persistent cache. "Database" is a bit of a stretch. Could you elaborate on what your production load is?

afhof• 12 years ago

Dumping the entire database to disk on every write? I can't imagine more than 1 qps.

armon• 12 years ago

By this measure Memcached offers a greater feature set, an infinitely more robust parser, request concurrency, and doesn't really on a garbage collector. The very fact that this "db" relies on HTTP requests already makes me cringe.

dpweb• 12 years ago

I'm writing to disk on every insert - mainly just for simplicity for this article. Same with semicolon delim string, normally I serialize to/from JSON. Normally, I only flush to disk periodically using setInterval.

I'll try and do a followup post with actual load tests. I load test using loader.io 35k requests total (increasing to 500 clients) in 20 seconds, I go from 50ms response to 200ms but no higher than that. I'd have to do more specific tests.

This is on a tiny $1/mo 128MB ram VPS but with SSD.

Granted this isn't your native-C powerhouse database, but I would bet 95% of websites get less than 10k requests a day and this could easily handle that load.

ZitchDog• 12 years ago

You are relying on disk io for each update, which can easily be slower than a web request. Either that, or you aren't flushing to disk, which could mean data loss. Modern databases use a write-ahead log to store data that hasn't been flushed to disk yet. If you aren't doing that, you don't have a database, you have a cache.

jermo• 12 years ago

If database/redis is too heavy and plain json too light then one could use something like Strata [1].

It stores json documents on disk using a b-tree.

[1] http://bigeasy.github.io/strata/

Littlest database that could

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