2022-08-21 06:51:43 +03:00
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---
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title: "Side project retrospective"
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date: 2022-08-21T06:15:56+03:00
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2023-02-20 16:51:40 +02:00
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description: "I worked on a side project from 2022 Jan until 2022 August. This is a short retrospective."
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2022-08-21 06:51:43 +03:00
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---
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I spent 7 months building a project (hosted [here][turbonss]). Goal: make a
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fastest known user/group NSS database. I succeeded, kinda. Here is an excerpt
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from a conclusion I wrote this morning:
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This is the fastest known NSS passwd/group implementation for *reads*. On a
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corpus with 10k users, 10k groups and 500 average members per group, `id`
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takes 17 seconds with the glibc default implementation, 10-17 milliseconds
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with a pre-cached `nscd`, ~8 milliseconds with `turbonss`.
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Guess what? It is fastest, but not by enough (compared to nscd) to matter.
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In lines of code:
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===========================================================================
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Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks
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===========================================================================
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Markdown 3 522 0 422 100
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Zig 23 5560 4601 242 717
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===========================================================================
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Total 26 6082 4601 664 817
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===========================================================================
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This enterprise reminds me of a project I did back at Amazon: I set out to
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write a faster and more memory efficient throttling daemon (an API-compatible
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CoralThrottle replacement). It took me ~1 month to build something that can be
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meaningfully compared. Then while comparing the two I discovered that
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CoralThrottle was not configured correctly on our environment. When I fixed
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that, my implementation was even slower (to be expected!) than the upstream
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one.
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Story repeats itself.
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How was it?
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-----------
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Loads of fun! I learned Zig quite a bit, [contributed][zig-pr-motiejus] to the
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stdlib. I can comfortably say that it is an amazing language for systems
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programming. The best parts are C interop and comptime.
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The initial motivation cooled down after 1-2 months, then I needed discipline
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to get back to it. After 5 months of work I did not even start writing the
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system integration part, so for a very long time I had nothing but unit tests
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to see the progress.
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I did not let myself start another project until this is finished. That was my
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way to keep the "motivation" up. Now, on the morning of Sunday, 2022-08-21, it
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is finished.
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What's next?
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------------
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I will weather-proof the furniture in my terrace. :)
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On a serious note, I don't know what I will do with computers "on the side".
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Maybe something with maps, finally. You will find it here.
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[turbonss]: https://git.sr.ht/~motiejus/turbonss/
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[zig-pr-motiejus]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Amotiejus+
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