✨ shiny ✨

Shiny is an alternative server framework for Go that uses I/O multiplexing. It makes direct epoll and kqueue syscalls rather than the standard Go net package.

It uses the Reactor pattern where the server waits for the OS to signal a readiness event. This is similar to the way that libuv, libevent, haproxy, nginx, redis, and other high performance servers work.

The goal of this project is to create a simple server framework for Go that performs on par with Redis and Haproxy for packet handling, but without having to interop with Cgo. My hope is to use this as a foundation for Tile38 and other projects. Early benchmarks are exceeding my expectations.

This project is a work in progress. The API will likely change between now and Tile38 v2.0 release.

Features

• Simple API. Only one entrypoint and four event functions
• Low memory usage
• Very fast single-threaded support
• Support for non-epoll/kqueue operating systems by simulating events with the net package.

Getting Started

Installing

To start using Shiny, install Go and run go get:

$ go get -u github.com/tidwall/shiny

This will retrieve the library.

Usage

There's only the one function:

func Serve(net, addr string,
    handle func(id int, data []byte, ctx interface{}) (send []byte, keepopen bool),
    accept func(id int, addr string, wake func(), ctx interface{}) (send []byte, keepopen bool),
    closed func(id int, err error, ctx interface{}),
    ticker func(ctx interface{}) (keepserving bool),
    ctx interface{}) error

• All events are executed in the same thread as the Serve call.
• handle, accept, and closed events have an id param which is a unique number assigned to the client socket.
• data represents a network packet.
• ctx is a user-defined context or nil.
• wake is a function that when called will trigger the handle event with zero data for the specified id. It can be called safely from other Goroutines.
• ticker is an event that fires between 1 and 60 times a second, depending on the packet traffic.

Example

Please check out the examples subdirectory for a simplified redis clone and an echo server.

Here's a basic echo server:

package main

import (
	"flag"
	"fmt"
	"log"

	"github.com/tidwall/shiny"
)

var shutdown bool
var started bool
var port int

func main() {
	flag.IntVar(&port, "port", 9999, "server port")
	flag.Parse()
	log.Fatal(shiny.Serve("tcp", fmt.Sprintf(":%d", port),
		handle, accept, closed, ticker, nil))
}

// handle - the incoming client socket data.
func handle(id int, data []byte, ctx interface{}) (send []byte, keepopen bool) {
	if shutdown {
		return nil, false
	}
	keepopen = true
	if string(data) == "shutdown\r\n" {
		shutdown = true
	} else if string(data) == "quit\r\n" {
		keepopen = false
	}
	return data, keepopen
}

// accept - a new client socket has opened.
// 'wake' is a function that when called will fire a 'handle' event
// for the specified ID, and is goroutine-safe.
func accept(id int, addr string, wake func(), ctx interface{}) (send []byte, keepopen bool) {
	if shutdown {
		return nil, false
	}
	// this is a good place to create a user-defined socket context.
	return []byte(
		"Welcome to the echo server!\n" +
			"Enter 'quit' to close your connection or " +
			"'shutdown' to close the server.\n"), true
}

// closed - a client socket has closed
func closed(id int, err error, ctx interface{}) {
	// teardown the socket context here
}

// ticker - a ticker that fires between 1 and 1/20 of a second
// depending on the traffic.
func ticker(ctx interface{}) (keepserving bool) {
	if shutdown {
		// do server teardown here
		return false
	}
	if !started {
		fmt.Printf("echo server started on port %d\n", port)
		started = true
	}
	// perform various non-socket io related operations here
	return true
}

Run the example:

$ go run examples/echo-server/main.go

Connect to the server:

$ telnet localhost 9999

Performance

The benchmarks below use pipelining which allows for combining multiple Redis commands into a single packet.

Redis

$ redis-server --port 6379 --appendonly no

redis-benchmark -p 6379 -t ping,set,get -q -P 128
PING_INLINE: 961538.44 requests per second
PING_BULK: 1960784.38 requests per second
SET: 943396.25 requests per second
GET: 1369863.00 requests per second

Shiny

$ go run examples/redis-server/main.go --port 6380 --appendonly no

redis-benchmark -p 6380 -t ping,set,get -q -P 128
PING_INLINE: 3846153.75 requests per second
PING_BULK: 4166666.75 requests per second
SET: 3703703.50 requests per second
GET: 3846153.75 requests per second

Running on a MacBook Pro 15" 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 using Go 1.7

Contact

Josh Baker @tidwall

License

Shiny source code is available under the MIT License.