Artem Krylysov

String interning is a technique of storing only one copy of each unique string in memory. It can significantly reduce memory usage for applications that store many duplicated strings.

A few months ago I released the first version of an embedded on-disk key-value store written in Go. The store is about 10 times faster than LevelDB for random lookups. I'll explain why it's faster, but first let's talk about the reason why I decided to create my own key-value store.

Running Go on AWS Lambda is not something totally new - developers figured out how to launch Go binaries from Python a while ago, but it wasn't convenient and had some performance implications.

A few days ago Amazon announced an official Go support for AWS Lambda.

Cgo is a mechanism that allows Go packages call C code. The Go compiler enables cgo for every .go source file that imports a special pseudo package "C". The text in the comment before the import "C" line is treated as a C code. You can include headers, define functions, types and variables - everything a normal C code can do:

package main

/*
#include <stdio.h>

void foo(int x) {
    printf("x: %d\n", x);
}
 */
import "C"

func main() {
    C.foo(C.int(123)) // x: 123
}

Go has a powerful built-in profiler that supports CPU, memory, goroutine and block (contention) profiling.

package main

import (
    "net/http"
    _ "net/http/pprof"
)

func hiHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    w.Write([]byte("hi"))
}

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", hiHandler)
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

Summers are so hot in Philadelphia, we decided to chill out a little bit in Iceland on the way back to the USA from Russia. Also, spending a vacation only for Russia is a total waste.

Summer is the best time to recall the good cold winter days. During the 2015-2016 winter I had a chance to go snowboarding in Colorado and Pennsylvania.

Here are the slides from my talk "Scraping the Web with AWS Lambda and PhantomJS" given at Greater Philadelphia AWS User Group meetup on May 25, 2016.

You can find the source code of PhantomJS/Node.js web scraper for AWS Lambda at https://github.com/akrylysov/lambda-phantom-scraper.

Late December, 70 °F (21 °C), the winter hasn't arrived in Philadelphia yet, but we decided to spend our "winter break" lying on the beach. There are many destinations within a short flight from the USA - Mexico, Cuba and a dozen of small island countries. For some places like Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands you don't even need to leave the territory of the country.

This post was updated on 2016/08/13: added python-rapidjson; updated simplejson and ujson.

A couple of weeks ago after spending some time with Python profiler, I discovered that Python’s json module is not as fast as I expected. I decided to benchmark alternative JSON libraries.