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content/log/2022/side-project-retrospective.md

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