Posted on

Fast Topic Matching

A common problem in messaging middleware is that of efficiently matching message topics with interested subscribers. For example, assume we have a set of subscribers, numbered 1 to 3:

Subscriber Match Request
1 forex.usd
2 forex.*
3 stock.nasdaq.msft

And we have a stream of messages, numbered 1 to N:

Message Topic
1 forex.gbp
2 stock.nyse.ibm
3 stock.nyse.ge
4 forex.eur
5 forex.usd
… …
N stock.nasdaq.msft

We are then tasked with routing messages whose topics match the respective subscriber requests, where a “*” wildcard matches any word. This is frequently a bottleneck for message-oriented middleware like ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, TIBCO EMS, et al. Because of this, there are a number of well-known solutions to the problem. In this post, I’ll describe some of these solutions, as well as a novel one, and attempt to quantify them through benchmarking. As usual, the code is available on GitHub.

The Naive Solution

The naive solution is pretty simple: use a hashmap that maps topics to subscribers. Subscribing involves adding a new entry to the map (or appending to a list if it already exists). Matching a message to subscribers involves scanning through every entry in the map, checking if the match request matches the message topic, and returning the subscribers for those that do.

Inserts are approximately O(1) and lookups approximately O(n*m) where n is the number of subscriptions and m is the number of words in a topic. This means the performance of this solution is heavily dependent upon how many subscriptions exist in the map and also the access patterns (rate of reads vs. writes). Since most use cases are heavily biased towards searches rather than updates, the naive solution—unsurprisingly—is not a great option.

The microbenchmark below compares the performance of subscribe, unsubscribe, and lookup (matching) operations, first using an empty hashmap (what we call cold) and then with one containing 1,000 randomly generated 5-word topic subscriptions (what we call hot). With the populated subscription map, lookups are about three orders of magnitude slower, which is why we have to use a log scale in the chart below.

subscribe unsubscribe lookup
cold 172ns 51.2ns 787ns
hot 221ns 55ns 815,787ns


Inverted Bitmap

The inverted bitmap technique builds on the observation that lookups are more frequent than updates and assumes that the search space is finite. Consequently, it shifts some of the cost from the read path to the write path. It works by storing a set of bitmaps, one per topic, or criteria, in the search space. Subscriptions are then assigned an increasing number starting at 0. We analyze each subscription to determine the matching criteria and set the corresponding bits in the criteria bitmaps to 1. For example, assume our search space consists of the following set of topics:

  • forex.usd
  • forex.gbp
  • forex.jpy
  • forex.eur
  • stock.nasdaq
  • stock.nyse

We then have the following subscriptions:

  • 0 = forex.* (matches forex.usd, forex.gbp, forex.jpy, and forex.eur)
  • 1 = stock.nyse (matches stock.nyse)
  • 2 = *.* (matches everything)
  • 3 = stock.* (matches stock.nasdaq and stock.nyse)

When we index the subscriptions above, we get the following set of bitmaps:

 Criteria 0 1 2 3
forex.usd 1 0 1 0
forex.gbp 1 0 1 0
forex.jpy 1 0 1 0
forex.eur 1 0 1 0
stock.nasdaq 0 0 1 1
stock.nyse 0 1 1 1

When we match a message, we simply need to lookup the corresponding bitmap and check the set bits. As we see below, subscribe and unsubscribe are quite expensive with respect to the naive solution, but lookups now fall well below half a microsecond, which is pretty good (the fact that the chart below doesn’t use a log scale like the one above should be an indictment of the naive hashmap-based solution).

subscribe unsubscribe lookup
cold 3,795ns 198ns 380ns
hot 3,863ns 198ns 395ns

The inverted bitmap is a better option than the hashmap when we have a read-heavy workload. One limitation is it requires us to know the search space ahead of time or otherwise requires reindexing which, frankly, is prohibitively expensive.

Optimized Inverted Bitmap

The inverted bitmap technique works well enough, but only if the topic space is fairly static. It also falls over pretty quickly when the topic space and number of subscriptions are large, say, millions of topics and thousands of subscribers. The main benefit of topic-based routing is it allows for faster matching algorithms in contrast to content-based routing, which can be exponentially slower. The truth is, to be useful, your topics probably consist of stock.nyse.ibm, stock.nyse.ge, stock.nasdaq.msft, stock.nasdaq.aapl, etc., not stock.nyse and stock.nasdaq. We could end up with an explosion of topics and, even with efficient bitmaps, the memory consumption tends to be too high despite the fact that most of the bitmaps are quite sparse.

Fortunately, we can reduce the amount of memory we consume using a fairly straightforward optimization. Rather than requiring the entire search space a priori, we simply require the max topic size, in terms of words, e.g. stock.nyse.ibm has a size of 3. We can handle topics of the max size or less, e.g. stock.nyse.bac, stock.nasdaq.txn, forex.usd, index, etc. If we see a message with more words than the max, we can safely assume there are no matching subscriptions.

The optimized inverted bitmap works by splitting topics into their constituent parts. Each constituent position has a set of bitmaps, and we use a technique similar to the one described above on each part. We end up with a bitmap for each constituent which we perform a logical AND on to give a resulting bitmap. Each 1 in the resulting bitmap corresponds to a subscription. This means if the max topic size is n, we only AND at most n bitmaps. Furthermore, if we come across any empty bitmaps, we can stop early since we know there are no matching subscribers.

Let’s say our max topic size is 2 and we have the following subscriptions:

  • 0 = forex.*
  • 1 = stock.nyse
  • 2 = index
  • 3 = stock.*

The inverted bitmap for the first constituent looks like the following:

forex.* stock.nyse index stock.*
null 0 0 0 0
forex 1 0 0 0
stock 0 1 0 1
index 0 0 1 0
other 0 0 0 0

And the second constituent bitmap:

forex.* stock.nyse index stock.*
null 0 0 1 0
nyse 0 1 0 0
other 1 0 0 1

The “null” and “other” rows are worth pointing out. “Null” simply means the topic has no corresponding constituent.  For example, “index” has no second constituent, so “null” is marked. “Other” allows us to limit the number of rows needed such that we only need the ones that appear in subscriptions.  For example, if messages are published on forex.eur, forex.usd, and forex.gbp but I merely subscribe to forex.*, there’s no need to index eur, usd, or gbp. Instead, we just mark the “other” row which will match all of them.

Let’s look at an example using the above bitmaps. Imagine we want to route a message published on forex.eur. We split the topic into its constituents: “forex” and “eur.” We get the row corresponding to “forex” from the first constituent bitmap, the one corresponding to “eur” from the second (other), and then AND the rows.

forex.* stock.nyse index stock.*
1 = forex 1 0 0 0
2 = other 1 0 0 1
AND 1 0 0 0

The forex.* subscription matches.

Let’s try one more example: a message published on stock.nyse.

forex.* stock.nyse index stock.*
1 = stock 0 1 0 1
2 = nyse 0 1 0 1
AND 0 1 0 1

In this case, we also need to OR the “other” row for the second constituent. This gives us a match for stock.nyse and stock.*.

Subscribe operations are significantly faster with the space-optimized inverted bitmap compared to the normal inverted bitmap, but lookups are much slower. However, the optimized version consumes roughly 4.5x less memory for every subscription. The increased flexibility and improved scalability makes the optimized version a better choice for all but the very latency-sensitive use cases.

subscribe unsubscribe lookup
cold 1,053ns 330ns 2,724ns
hot 1,076ns 371ns 3,337ns

Trie

The optimized inverted bitmap improves space complexity, but it does so at the cost of lookup efficiency. Is there a way we can reconcile both time and space complexity? While inverted bitmaps allow for efficient lookups, they are quite wasteful for sparse sets, even when using highly compressed bitmaps like Roaring bitmaps.

Tries can often be more space efficient in these circumstances. When we add a subscription, we descend the trie, adding nodes along the way as necessary, until we run out of words in the topic. Finally, we add some metadata containing the subscription information to the last node in the chain. To match a message topic, we perform a similar traversal. If a node doesn’t exist in the chain, we know there are no subscribers. One downside of this method is, in order to support wildcards, we must backtrack on a literal match and check the “*” branch as well.

For the given set of subscriptions, the trie would look something like the following:

  • forex.*
  • stock.nyse
  • index
  • stock.*

You might be tempted to ask: “why do we even need the “*” nodes? When someone subscribes to stock.*, just follow all branches after “stock” and add the subscriber.” This would indeed move the backtracking cost from the read path to the write path, but—like the first inverted bitmap we looked at—it only works if the search space is known ahead of time. It would also largely negate the memory-usage benefits we’re looking for since it would require pre-indexing all topics while requiring a finite search space.

It turns out, this trie technique is how systems like ZeroMQ and RabbitMQ implement their topic matching due to its balance between space and time complexity and overall performance predictability.

subscribe unsubscribe lookup
cold 406ns 221ns 2,145ns
hot 443ns 257ns 2,278ns

We can see that, compared to the optimized inverted bitmap, the trie performs much more predictably with relation to the number of subscriptions held.

Concurrent Subscription Trie

One thing we haven’t paid much attention to so far is concurrency. Indeed, message-oriented middleware is typically highly concurrent since they have to deal with heavy IO (reading messages from the wire, writing messages to the wire, reading messages from disk, writing messages to disk, etc.) and CPU operations (like topic matching and routing). Subscribe, unsubscribe, and lookups are usually all happening in different threads of execution. This is especially important when we want to talk advantage of multi-core processors.

It wasn’t shown, but all of the preceding algorithms used global locks to ensure thread safety between read and write operations, making the data structures safe for concurrent use. However, the microbenchmarks don’t really show the impact of this, which we will see momentarily.

Lock-freedom, which I’ve written about, allows us to increase throughput at the expense of increased tail latency.

Lock-free concurrency means that while a particular thread of execution may be blocked, all CPUs are able to continue processing other work. For example, imagine a program that protects access to some resource using a mutex. If a thread acquires this mutex and is subsequently preempted, no other thread can proceed until this thread is rescheduled by the OS. If the scheduler is adversarial, it may never resume execution of the thread, and the program would be effectively deadlocked. A key point, however, is that the mere lack of a lock does not guarantee a program is lock-free. In this context, “lock” really refers to deadlock, livelock, or the misdeeds of a malevolent scheduler.

The concurrent subscription trie, or CS-trie,  is a new take on the trie-based solution described earlier. It combines the idea of the topic-matching trie with that of a Ctrie, or concurrent trie, which is a non-blocking concurrent hash trie.

The fundamental problem with the trie, as it relates to concurrency, is it requires a global lock, which severely limits throughput. To address this, the CS-trie uses indirection nodes, or I-nodes, which remain present in the trie even as the nodes above and below change. Subscriptions are then added or removed by creating a copy of the respective node, and performing a CAS on its parent I-node. This allows us to add, remove, and lookup subscriptions concurrently and in a lock-free, linearizable manner.

For the given set of subscribers, labeled x, y, and z, the CS-trie would look something like the following:

  • x = foo, bar, bar.baz
  • y = foo, bar.qux
  • z = bar.*

Lookups on the CS-trie perform, on average, better than the standard trie, and the CS-trie scales better with respect to concurrent operations.

subscribe unsubscribe lookup
cold 412ns 245ns 1,615ns
hot 471ns 280ns 1,637ns

Latency Comparison

The chart below shows the topic-matching operation latencies for all of the algorithms side-by-side. First, we look at the performance of a cold start (no subscriptions) and then the performance of a hot start (1,000 subscriptions).

Throughput Comparison

So far, we’ve looked at the latency of individual topic-matching operations. Next, we look at overall throughput of each of the algorithms and their memory footprint.

 algorithm msg/sec
naive  4,053.48
inverted bitmap  1,052,315.02
optimized inverted bitmap  130,705.98
trie  248,762.10
cs-trie  340,910.64

On the surface, the inverted bitmap looks like the clear winner, clocking in at over 1 million matches per second. However, we know the inverted bitmap does not scale and, indeed, this becomes clear when we look at memory consumption, underscored by the fact that the below chart uses a log scale.

Scalability with Respect to Concurrency

Lastly, we’ll look at how each of these algorithms scales with respect to concurrency. We do this by performing concurrent operations and varying the level of concurrency and number of operations. We start with a 50-50 split between reads and writes. We vary the number of goroutines from 2 to 16 (the benchmark was run using a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 processor with 8 logical cores). Each goroutine performs 1,000 reads or 1,000 writes. For example, the 2-goroutine benchmark performs 1,000 reads and 1,000 writes, the 4-goroutine benchmark performs 2,000 reads and 2,000 writes, etc. We then measure the total amount of time needed to complete the workload.

We can see that the tries hardly even register on the scale above, so we’ll plot them separately.

The tries are clearly much more efficient than the other solutions, but the CS-trie in particular scales well to the increased workload and concurrency.

Since most workloads are heavily biased towards reads over writes, we’ll run a separate benchmark that uses a 90-10 split reads and writes. This should hopefully provide a more realistic result.

The results look, more or less, like what we would expect, with the reduced writes improving the inverted bitmap performance. The CS-trie still scales quite well in comparison to the global-lock trie.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, there are several approaches to consider to implement fast topic matching. There are also several aspects to look at: read/write access patterns, time complexity, space complexity, throughput, and latency.

The naive hashmap solution is generally a poor choice due to its prohibitively expensive lookup time. Inverted bitmaps offer a better solution. The standard implementation is reasonable if the search space is finite, small, and known a priori, especially if read latency is critical. The space-optimized version is a better choice for scalability, offering a good balance between read and write performance while keeping a small memory footprint. The trie is an even better choice, providing lower latency than the optimized inverted bitmap and consuming less memory. It’s particularly good if the subscription tree is sparse and topics are not known a priori. Lastly, the concurrent subscription trie is the best option if there is high concurrency and throughput matters. It offers similar performance to the trie but scales better. The only downside is an increase in implementation complexity.

Posted on

Iris Decentralized Cloud Messaging

A couple weeks ago, I published a rather extensive analysis of numerous message queues, both brokered and brokerless. Brokerless messaging is really just another name for peer-to-peer communication. As we saw, the difference in message latency and throughput between peer-to-peer systems and brokered ones is several orders of magnitude. ZeroMQ and nanomsg are able to reliably transmit millions of messages per second at the expense of guaranteed delivery.

Peer-to-peer messaging is decentralized, scalable, and fast, but it brings with it an inherent complexity. There is a dichotomy between how brokerless messaging is conceptualized and how distributed systems are actually built. Distributed systems are composed of services like applications, databases, caches, etc. Services are composed of instances or nodes—individually addressable hosts, either physical or virtual. The key observation is that, conceptually, the unit of interaction lies at the service level, not the instance level. We don’t care about which database server we interact with, we just want to talk to a database server (or perhaps multiple). We’re concerned with logical groups of nodes.

While traditional socket-queuing systems like ZeroMQ solve the problem of scaling, they bring about a certain coupling between components. System designers are forced to build applications which communicate with nodes, not services. We can introduce load balancers like HAProxy, but we’re still addressing specific locations while creating potential single points of failure. With lightweight VMs and the pervasiveness of elastic clouds, IP addresses are becoming less and less static—they come and go. The canonical way of dealing with this problem is to use distributed coordination and service discovery via ZooKeeper, et al., but this introduces more configuration, more moving parts, and more headaches.

The reality is that distributed systems are not built with the instance as the smallest unit of composition in mind, they’re built with services in mind. As discussed earlier, a service is simply a logical grouping of nodes. This abstraction is what we attempt to mimic with things like etcd, ZooKeeper and HAProxy. These assemblies are proven, but there are alternative solutions that offer zero configuration, minimal network management, and overall less complexity. One such solution that I want to explore is a distributed messaging framework called Iris.

Decentralized Messaging with Iris

Iris is posited as a decentralized approach to backend messaging middleware. It looks to address several of the fundamental issues with traditional brokerless systems, like tight coupling and security.

In order to avoid the problem of addressing instances, Iris considers clusters to be the smallest logical blocks of which systems are composed. A cluster is a collection of zero or more nodes which are responsible for a certain service sub-task. Clusters are then assembled into services such that they can communicate with each other without any regard as to which instance is servicing their requests or where it’s located. Lastly, services are composed into federations, which allow them to communicate across different clouds.

This form of composition allows Iris to use semantic or logical addressing instead of the standard physical addressing. Nodes specify the name of the cluster they wish to participate in, while Iris handles the intricacies of routing and balancing. For example, you might have three database servers which belong to a single cluster called “databases.” The cluster is reached by its name and requests are distributed across the three nodes. Iris also takes care of service discovery, detecting new clusters as they are created on the same cloud.

With libraries like ZeroMQ, security tends to be an afterthought. Iris has been built from the ground-up with security in mind, and it provides a security model that is simple and fast.

Iris uses a relaxed security model that provides perfect secrecy whilst at the same time requiring effectively zero configuration. This is achieved through the observation that if a node of a service is compromised, the whole system is considered undermined. Hence, the unit of security is a service – opposed to individual instances – where any successfully authenticated node is trusted by all. This enables full data protection whilst maintaining the loosely coupled nature of the system.

In practice, what this means is that each cluster uses a single private key. This encryption scheme not only makes deployment trivial, it minimizes the effect security has on speed.

Like ZeroMQ and nanomsg, Iris offers a few different messaging patterns. It provides the standard request-reply and publish-subscribe schemes, but it’s important to remember that the smallest addressable unit is the cluster, not the node. As such, requests are targeted at a cluster and subsequently relayed on to a member in a load-balanced fashion. Publish-subscribe, on the other hand, is not targeted at a single cluster. It allows members of any cluster to subscribe and publish to a topic.

Iris also implements two patterns called “broadcast” and “tunnel.” While request-reply forwards a message to one member of a cluster, broadcast forwards it to all members. The caveat is that there is no way to listen for responses to a broadcast.

Tunnel is designed to address the problem of stateful or streaming transactions where a communication between two endpoints may consist of multiple data exchanges which need to occur as an atomic operation. It provides the guarantee of in-order and throttled message delivery by establishing a channel between a client and a node.

Performance Characteristics

According to its author, Iris is still in a “feature phase” and hasn’t been optimized for speed. Since it’s written in Go, I’ve compared its pub/sub benchmark performance with other Go messaging libraries, NATS and NSQ. As before, these benchmarks shouldn’t be taken as gospel, the code is available here, and pull requests are welcome.

We can see that Iris is comparable to NSQ on the sending side and about 4x on the receiving side, at least out of the box.

Conclusion

Brokerless systems like ZeroMQ and nanomsg offer considerably higher throughput and less latency than classical message-oriented middleware but require greater orchestration of network topologies. They offer high scalability but can lead to tighter coupling between components. Traditional brokered message queues, like those of the AMQP variety, tend to be slower while providing more guarantees and reduced coupling. However, they are also more prone to scale problems like availability and partitioning.

In terms of its qualities, Iris appears to be a reasonable compromise between the decentralized nature of the brokerless systems and the minimal-configuration and management of the brokered ones. Its intrinsic value lies in its ability to hide the complexities of the underlying infrastructure behind distributed systems. Rather, Iris lends itself to building large-scale systems the way we conceptualize and reason about them—by using services as the building blocks, not instances.

Posted on

Dissecting Message Queues

Disclaimer (10/29/20) – The benchmarks and performance analysis presented in this post should not be relied on. This post was written roughly six years ago, and at the time, was just the result of my exploration of various messaging systems. The benchmarks are not implemented in a meaningful way, which I discussed in a follow-up post. This post will remain for posterity and learning purposes, but I do not claim that this information is accurate or useful.

Continuing my series on message queues, I spent this weekend dissecting various libraries for performing distributed messaging. In this analysis, I look at a few different aspects, including API characteristics, ease of deployment and maintenance, and performance qualities. The message queues have been categorized into two groups: brokerless and brokered. Brokerless message queues are peer-to-peer such that there is no middleman involved in the transmission of messages, while brokered queues have some sort of server in between endpoints.

The systems I’ll be analyzing are:

Brokerless
nanomsg
ZeroMQ

Brokered
ActiveMQ
NATS
Kafka
Kestrel
NSQ
RabbitMQ
Redis
ruby-nats

To start, let’s look at the performance metrics since this is arguably what people care the most about. I’ve measured two key metrics: throughput and latency. All tests were run on a MacBook Pro 2.6 GHz i7, 16GB RAM. These tests are evaluating a publish-subscribe topology with a single producer and single consumer. This provides a good baseline. It would be interesting to benchmark a scaled-up topology but requires more instrumentation.

The code used for benchmarking, written in Go, is available on GitHub. The results below shouldn’t be taken as gospel as there are likely optimizations that can be made to squeeze out performance gains. Pull requests are welcome.

Throughput Benchmarks

Throughput is the number of messages per second the system is able to process, but what’s important to note here is that there is no single “throughput” that a queue might have. We’re sending messages between two different endpoints, so what we observe is a “sender” throughput and a “receiver” throughput—that is, the number of messages that can be sent per second and the number of messages that can be received per second.

This test was performed by sending 1,000,000 1KB messages and measuring the time to send and receive on each side. Many performance tests tend to use smaller messages in the range of 100 to 500 bytes. I chose 1KB because it’s more representative of what you might see in a production environment, although this varies case by case. For message-oriented middleware systems, only one broker was used. In most cases, a clustered environment would yield much better results.

Unsurprisingly, there’s higher throughput on the sending side. What’s interesting, however, is the disparity in the sender-to-receiver ratios. ZeroMQ is capable of sending over 5,000,000 messages per second but is only able to receive about 600,000/second. In contrast, nanomsg sends shy of 3,000,000/second but can receive almost 2,000,000.

Now let’s take a look at the brokered message queues.

Intuitively, we observe that brokered message queues have dramatically less throughput than their brokerless counterparts by a couple orders of magnitude for the most part. Half the brokered queues have a throughput below 25,000 messages/second. The numbers for Redis might be a bit misleading though. Despite providing pub/sub functionality, it’s not really designed to operate as a robust messaging queue. In a similar fashion to ZeroMQ, Redis disconnects slow clients, and it’s important to point out that it was not able to reliably handle this volume of messaging. As such, we consider it an outlier. Kafka and ruby-nats have similar performance characteristics to Redis but were able to reliably handle the message volume without intermittent failures. The Go implementation of NATS, gnatsd, has exceptional throughput for a brokered message queue.

Outliers aside, we see that the brokered queues have fairly uniform throughputs. Unlike the brokerless libraries, there is little-to-no disparity in the sender-to-receiver ratios, which themselves are all very close to one.

Latency Benchmarks

The second key performance metric is message latency. This measures how long it takes for a message to be transmitted between endpoints. Intuition might tell us that this is simply the inverse of throughput, i.e. if throughput is messages/second, latency is seconds/message. However, by looking closely at this image borrowed from a ZeroMQ white paper, we can see that this isn’t quite the case.

The reality is that the latency per message sent over the wire is not uniform. It can vary wildly for each one. In truth, the relationship between latency and throughput is a bit more involved. Unlike throughput, however, latency is not measured at the sender or the receiver but rather as a whole. But since each message has its own latency, we will look at the averages of all of them. Going further, we will see how the average message latency fluctuates in relation to the number of messages sent. Again, intuition tells us that more messages means more queueing, which means higher latency.

As we did before, we’ll start by looking at the brokerless systems.

In general, our hypothesis proves correct in that, as more messages are sent through the system, the latency of each message increases. What’s interesting is the tapering at the 500,000-point in which latency appears to increase at a slower rate as we approach 1,000,000 messages. Another interesting observation is the initial spike in latency between 1,000 and 5,000 messages, which is more pronounced with nanomsg. It’s difficult to pinpoint causation, but these changes might be indicative of how message batching and other network-stack traversal optimizations are implemented in each library. More data points may provide better visibility.

We see some similar patterns with brokered queues and also some interesting new ones.

Redis behaves in a similar manner as before, with an initial latency spike and then a quick tapering off. It differs in that the tapering becomes essentially constant right after 5,000 messages. NSQ doesn’t exhibit the same spike in latency and behaves, more or less, linearly. Kestrel fits our hypothesis.

Notice that ruby-nats and NATS hardly even register on the chart. They exhibited surprisingly low latencies and unexpected relationships with the number of messages.

Interestingly, the message latencies for ruby-nats and NATS appear to be constant. This is counterintuitive to our hypothesis.

You may have noticed that Kafka, ActiveMQ, and RabbitMQ were absent from the above charts. This was because their latencies tended to be orders-of-magnitude higher than the other brokered message queues, so ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ were grouped into their own AMQP category. I’ve also included Kafka since it’s in the same ballpark.

Here we see that RabbitMQ’s latency is constant, while ActiveMQ and Kafka are linear. What’s unclear is the apparent disconnect between their throughput and mean latencies.

Qualitative Analysis

Now that we’ve seen some empirical data on how these different libraries perform, I’ll take a look at how they work from a pragmatic point of view. Message throughput and speed is important, but it isn’t very practical if the library is difficult to use, deploy, or maintain.

ZeroMQ and Nanomsg

Technically speaking, nanomsg isn’t a message queue but rather a socket-style library for performing distributed messaging through a variety of convenient patterns. As a result, there’s nothing to deploy aside from embedding the library itself within your application. This makes deployment a non-issue.

Nanomsg is written by one of the ZeroMQ authors, and as I discussed before, works in a very similar way to that library. From a development standpoint, nanomsg provides an overall cleaner API. Unlike ZeroMQ, there is no notion of a context in which sockets are bound to. Furthermore, nanomsg provides pluggable transport and messaging protocols, which make it more open to extension. Its additional built-in scalability protocols also make it quite appealing.

Like ZeroMQ, it guarantees that messages will be delivered atomically intact and ordered but does not guarantee the delivery of them. Partial messages will not be delivered, and it’s possible that some messages won’t be delivered at all. The library’s author, Martin Sustrik, makes this abundantly clear:

Guaranteed delivery is a myth. Nothing is 100% guaranteed. That’s the nature of the world we live in. What we should do instead is to build an internet-like system that is resilient in face of failures and routes around damage.

The philosophy is to use a combination of topologies to build resilient systems that add in these guarantees in a best-effort sort of way.

On the other hand, nanomsg is still in beta and may not be considered production-ready. Consequently, there aren’t a lot of resources available and not much of a development community around it.

ZeroMQ is a battle-tested messaging library that’s been around since 2007. Some may perceive it as a predecessor to nanomsg, but what nano lacks is where ZeroMQ thrives—a flourishing developer community and a deluge of resources and supporting material. For many, it’s the de facto tool for building fast, asynchronous distributed messaging systems that scale.

Like nanomsg, ZeroMQ is not a message-oriented middleware and simply operates as a socket abstraction. In terms of usability, it’s very much the same as nanomsg, although its API is marginally more involved.

ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ are implementations of AMQP. They act as brokers which ensure messages are delivered. ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ support both persistent and non-persistent delivery. By default, messages are written to disk such that they survive a broker restart. They also support synchronous and asynchronous sending of messages with the former having substantial impact on latency. To guarantee delivery, these brokers use message acknowledgements which also incurs a massive latency penalty.

As far as availability and fault tolerance goes, these brokers support clustering through shared storage or shared nothing. Queues can be replicated across clustered nodes so there is no single point of failure or message loss.

AMQP is a non-trivial protocol which its creators claim to be over-engineered. These additional guarantees are made at the expense of major complexity and performance trade-offs. Fundamentally, clients are more difficult to implement and use.

Since they’re message brokers, ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ are additional moving parts that need to be managed in your distributed system, which brings deployment and maintenance costs. The same is true for the remaining message queues being discussed.

NATS and Ruby-NATS

NATS (gnatsd) is a pure Go implementation of the ruby-nats messaging system. NATS is distributed messaging rethought to be less enterprisey and more lightweight (this is in direct contrast to systems like ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and others). Apcera’s Derek Collison, the library’s author and former TIBCO architect, describes NATS as “more like a nervous system” than an enterprise message queue. It doesn’t do persistence or message transactions, but it’s fast and easy to use. Clustering is supported so it can be built on top of with high availability and failover in mind, and clients can be sharded. Unfortunately, TLS and SSL are not yet supported in NATS (they are in the ruby-nats) but on the roadmap.

As we observed earlier, NATS performs far better than the original Ruby implementation. Clients can be used interchangeably with NATS and ruby-nats.

Kafka

Originally developed by LinkedIn, Kafka implements publish-subscribe messaging through a distributed commit log. It’s designed to operate as a cluster that can be consumed by large amounts of clients. Horizontal scaling is done effortlessly using ZooKeeper so that additional consumers and brokers can be introduced seamlessly. It also transparently takes care of cluster rebalancing.

Kafka uses a persistent commit log to store messages on the broker. Unlike other durable queues which usually remove persisted messages on consumption, Kafka retains them for a configured period of time. This means that messages can be “replayed” in the event that a consumer fails.

ZooKeeper makes managing Kafka clusters relatively easy, but it does introduce yet another element that needs to be maintained. That said, Kafka exposes a great API and Shopify has an excellent Go client called Sarama that makes interfacing with Kafka very accessible.

Kestrel

Kestrel is a distributed message queue open sourced by Twitter. It’s intended to be fast and lightweight. Because of this, it has no concept of clustering or failover. While Kafka is built from the ground up to be clustered through ZooKeeper, the onus of message partitioning is put upon the clients of Kestrel. There is no cross-communication between nodes. It makes this trade-off in the name of simplicity. It features durable queues, item expiration, transactional reads, and fanout queues while operating over Thrift or memcache protocols.

Kestrel is designed to be small, but this means that more work must be done by the developer to build out a robust messaging system on top of it. Kafka seems to be a more “all-in-one” solution.

NSQ

NSQ is a messaging platform built by Bitly. I use the word platform because there’s a lot of tooling built around NSQ to make it useful for real-time distributed messaging. The daemon that receives, queues, and delivers messages to clients is called nsqd. The daemon can run standalone, but NSQ is designed to run in as a distributed, decentralized topology. To achieve this, it leverages another daemon called nsqlookupd. Nsqlookupd acts as a service-discovery mechanism for nsqd instances. NSQ also provides nsqadmin, which is a web UI that displays real-time cluster statistics and acts as a way to perform various administrative tasks like clearing queues and managing topics.

By default, messages in NSQ are not durable. It’s primarily designed to be an in-memory message queue, but queue sizes can be configured such that after a certain point, messages will be written to disk. Despite this, there is no built-in replication. NSQ uses acknowledgements to guarantee message delivery, but the order of delivery is not guaranteed. Messages can also be delivered more than once, so it’s the developer’s responsibility to introduce idempotence.

Similar to Kafka, additional nodes can be added to an NSQ cluster seamlessly. It also exposes both an HTTP and TCP API, which means you don’t actually need a client library to push messages into the system. Despite all the moving parts, it’s actually quite easy to deploy. Its API is also easy to use and there are a number of client libraries available.

Redis

Last up is Redis. While Redis is great for lightweight messaging and transient storage, I can’t advocate its use as the backbone of a distributed messaging system. Its pub/sub is fast but its capabilities are limited. It would require a lot of work to build a robust system. There are solutions better suited to the problem, such as those described above, and there are also some scaling concerns with it.

These matters aside, Redis is easy to use, it’s easy to deploy and manage, and it has a relatively small footprint. Depending on the use case, it can be a great choice for real-time messaging as I’ve explored before.

Conclusion

The purpose of this analysis is not to present some sort of “winner” but instead showcase a few different options for distributed messaging. There is no “one-size-fits-all” option because it depends entirely on your needs. Some use cases require fast, fire-and-forget messages, others require delivery guarantees. In fact, many systems will call for a combination of these. My hope is that this dissection will offer some insight into which solutions work best for a given problem so that you can make an intelligent decision.