<antirez>

Redis uses streamed asynchronous replication, that's one of the simplest forms of replication you can imagine: a continuos stream of writes is sent to the slaves, without waiting for the slaves to process the writes in any way before replying to the client.

I always gave that almost for granted, as I always assumed Redis was not a good match for synchronous replication, that has an higher latency. However recently I tried to fix another issue with Redis replication, that is, timeouts are all up to the slave.

Terah is a planet far away, where networks never split. They have a single issue with their computer networks, from time to time, single hosts break in a way or the other. Sometimes is a broken power supply, other times a crashed disk, or a software issue completely blocking the system.

The inhabitants of this strange planet use two database systems. One is imported from planet Earth via the Galactic Exchange Program, and is called EDB. The other is produced by engineers from Terah, and is called TDB. The databases are functionally equivalent, but they have different semantics when a network partition happens. While the database from Earth stops accepting writes as long as it is not connected with the majority of the other database nodes, the database from Terah works as long as the majority of the clients can reach at least a database node (incidentally, the author of this story released a similar software project called Sentinel, but this is just a coincidence).

In a great series of articles Kyle Kingsbury, aka @aphyr on Twitter, attacked a number of data stores:

[1] http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen

Postgress, Redis Sentinel, MongoDB, and Riak are audited to find what happens during network partitions and how these systems can provide the claimed guarantees.

Redis is attacked here: http://aphyr.com/posts/283-call-me-maybe-redis

I said that Kyle "attacked" the systems on purpose, as I see a parallel with the world of computer security here, it is really a good idea to move this paradigm to the database world, to show failure modes of systems against the claims of vendors. Similarly to what happens in the security world the vendor may take the right steps to fix the system when possible, or simply the user base will be able to recognize that under certain circumstances something bad is going to happen with your data.

Lately I'm trying to push forward Redis 2.8 enough to reach the feature freeze and release it as a stable release as soon as possible.
Redis 2.8 will not contain Redis Cluster, and its implementation of Redis Sentinel is the same as 2.6 and unstable branches, (Sentinel is taken mostly in sync in all the branches being fundamentally a different project using Redis just as framework).

However there are many new interesting features in Redis 2.8 that are back ported from the unstable branch. Basically 2.8 it's our usual "in the middle" release, like 2.4 was: waiting for Redis 3.0 that will feature Redis Cluster (we have great progresses about it! See https://vimeo.com/63672368), we'll have a 2.8 release with everything that is ready to be released into the unstable branch. The goal is of course to put more things in the hands of users ASAP.

Questo post ha lo scopo di presentare alla comunita' italiana interessata ai temi della programmazione e delle startup un progetto nato attorno ad un paio di birre: "Hacking Italia", che trovate all'indirizzo http://hackingitalia.com

Hacking Italia e' un sito di "social news", molto simile ad Hacker News, il celebre collettore di news per hacker di YCombinator. A che serve un sito italiano, e in italiano se c'e' gia' molto di piu' e di meglio nel panorama internazionale? A mettere assieme una massa critica di persone "giuste" in Italia.

Hello! As promised today I did some SSD testing.

The setup: a Linux box with 24 GB of RAM, with two disks.

A) A spinning disk.
b) An SSD (Intel 320 series).

The idea is, what happens if I set the SSD disk partition as a swap partition and fill Redis with a dataset larger than RAM?
It is a lot of time I want to do this test, especially now that Redis focus is only on RAM and I abandoned the idea of targeting disk for a number of reasons.

I already guessed that the SSD swap setup would perform in a bad way, but I was not expecting it was *so bad*.

One thing, more than everything else, keeps me focused while programming: never interrupt the flow.

If you ever wrote some complex piece of code you know what happens after some time: your mental model of the software starts to be very complex with different ideas nested inside other ideas, like the structure of your program is, after all.

So while you are writing this piece of code, you realize that because of it you need to do that other change. Something like "I'm freeing this object here, but it's connected to this two other objects and I need to do this and that in order to ensure consistent state".

After the "sexism gate" I started to use my Twitter account only for private stuff in order to protect the image of Redis and/from my freedom to say whatever I want. It did not worked actually since the reality is that people continue to address you with at-messages about Redis stuff.

But the good outcome is that now I created a @redisfeed account that I use in order to provide a stream of information to Redis users that are not interested in my personal tweets  not related to Redis. Anyway when I say some important thing regarding Redis with my personal account, I just retweet in the other side, so this is a good setup.

This is a very busy moment for Redis because the new year started in a very interesting way:

1) I finished the Partial Resynchronization patch (aka PSYNC) and merged it into the unstable and 2.8 branch. You can read more about it here: http://antirez.com/news/47
2) We finally have keyspace changes notifications: http://redis.io/topics/notifications

Everything is already merged into our development branches, so the deal is closed, and Redis 2.8 will include both the features.

I'm especially super excited about PSYNC, as this is a not-feature, simply you don't have to deal with it, the only change is that slaves work A LOT better. I love adding stuff that is transparent for users, just making the system better and more robust.

For a decade and half I contributed to open source regularly, and still it is relatively rare that I stop to think a bit more about what this means for me. Probably it is just because I like to write code, so this is how I use my time: writing code instead of thinking about what this means… however lately I'm starting to have a few recurring ideas about open source, its relationship with the IT industry, and my interpretation of what OSS is, for me, as a developer.

First of all, open source for me is not a way to contribute to the free software movement, but to contribute to humanity. This means a lot of things, for instance I don't care about what people do with my code, nor if they'll release back their modifications. I simply want people to use my code in one way or the other.