✨ shiny ✨

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

This is similar to the way that libuv, libevent, haproxy, nginx, redis, and other high performance network servers work.

The reason for this project is that I want to upgrade the networking for Tile38 so that it will perform on par with Redis, but without having to interop with Cgo. Early benchmarks are exceeding my expectations.

This project is a (sweet) 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),
    context interface{}) error

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 operation here
	return true
}

Run the example:

$ go run examples/echo-server.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.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.