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Friday round up 2008-02-29

Posted by Jonathan Conway on 2008-02-29  Comments

Britain was built on Queues!

A long while ago I wrote about messaging systems and I’d just like to give a quick update on that. A couple of weeks ago Twitter released Starling and although simplistic I’ve found it very stable and even easier to use as it uses the same protocol as memcache. Something that might be of interest to people out there is this, Chris Wanstrath is working on an evented version of Starling which no doubt should give some performance gains.

Another queuing system I’ve been playing around with lately is conveyor which is based on the excellent thin and uses HTTP as it’s transport protocol. Usually the purist in me would recoil from the thought using a fat protocol like HTTP for something like messaging. However, I bet for most cases it performs Good Enough©. There’s always going to be a trade off between simplicity and performance and if you really want speed & features then I still recommend you look at RabbitMQ, but for most cases something like conveyor will definitely do.

Like Starling it’s extremely easy to get started as conveyor’s interface is just a web server that conforms to Rails like REST conventions. Documentation is a bit sparse but the test suite is comprehensive and easy to grok.

I’m too poor to afford a CDN so I made one

Finally I was going to describe a setup for a poor mans/cheap CDN… However it’s been a crazy week so I’ll leave it till the weekend.