Fast Topic Matching

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 17:52:30 -0600

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

forex.usd

forex.*

stock.nasdaq.msft

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

Message

Topic

forex.gbp

stock.nyse.ibm

stock.nyse.ge

forex.eur

forex.usd

…

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.

Breaking and Entering: Lose the Lock While Embracing Concurrency

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 19:12:53 -0600

This article originally appeared on Workiva’s engineering blog as a two-part series.

Providing robust message routing was a priority for us at Workiva when building our distributed messaging infrastructure. This encompassed directed messaging, which allows us to route messages to specific endpoints based on service or client identifiers, but also topic fan-out with support for wildcards and pattern matching.

Existing message-oriented middleware, such as RabbitMQ, provide varying levels of support for these but don’t offer the rich features needed to power Wdesk. This includes transport fallback with graceful degradation, tunable qualities of service, support for client-side messaging, and pluggable authentication middleware. As such, we set out to build a new system, not by reinventing the wheel, but by repurposing it.

Tries on Brave New Geek

Fast Topic Matching

Breaking and Entering: Lose the Lock While Embracing Concurrency