[nanomsg] nanomsg 0.1-alpha released

From: Martin Sustrik <sustrik@xxxxxxxxxx>

To: nanomsg <nanomsg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:33:53 +0200

Hi all, I am happy to announce that nanomsg v0.1 have been released yesterday. http://nanomsg.org/download.html

The release is an alpha, so expect bugs to exist and don't use the

library in production environments.

Given that there's no previous version, instead of listing changes to

the project itself, here's a list of changes from ZeroMQ, its predecessor:

Licensing ---------

nanomsg library is MIT-licensed. What it means is that, unlike with

ZeroMQ, you can modify the source code and re-release it under a

different license, as a proprietary product et c. More reasoning about

the licensing can be found here: http://250bpm.com/blog:15

POSIX Compliance ----------------

ZeroMQ API, while modeled on BSD socket API, doesn't match the API

fully. nanomsg aims for full POSIX compliance.

- Sockets are represented as ints, not void pointers.

- Contexts, as known in ZeroMQ, don't exist in nanomsg. This means

simpler API (sockets can be created in a single step) as well as the

possibility of using the library for communication between different

modules in a single process (think of plugins implemented in different

languages speaking each to another). More discussion can be found here:

- Sending are receiving functions (nn_send, nn_sendmsg, nn_recv and

nn_recvmsg) fully match POSIX syntax and semantics.

Implementation Language ----------------------- The library is implemented in C instead of C++.

- From user's point of view it means that there's no dependency on C++

runtime (libstdc++ or similar) which may be handy in constrained and

embedded environments.

- Form nanomsg developer's point of view it makes life easier.

- Number of memory allocations is drastically reduced as intrusive

containers are used instead of C++ STL containers.

- The above also means less memory fragmentation, less cache misses et c.

- More discussion on the C vs. C++ topic can be found here:

Pluggable Transports and Protocols ----------------------------------

In ZeroMQ there was no formal API for plugging in new transports (think

WebSockets, DCCP, SCTP) and new protocols (counterparts to REQ/REP,

PUB/SUB et c.) As a consequence there were no new transports added since

2008. No new protocols were implemented either. The formal internal

transport API (see here

protocol API

(https://raw.github.com/250bpm/nanomsg/master/src/protocol.h) are meant

to mitigate the problem and serve as a base for creating and

experimenting with new transports and protocols. Please, be aware that

the two APIs are still new and may experience some tweaking in the

future to make them usable in wide variety of scenarios.

- nanomsg implements a new SURVEY protocol. The idea is to send a

message ("survey") to multiple peers and wait for responses from all of

them. For more details check the article here: http://250bpm.com/blog:5.

Also look here: http://250bpm.com/blog:20.

- In financial services it is quite common to use "deliver messages from

anyone to everyone else" kind of messaging. To address this use case,

there's a new BUS protocol implemented in nanomsg. Check the details

Threading Model ---------------

One of the big architectural blunders I've done in ZeroMQ is its

threading model. Each individual object is managed exclusively by a

single thread. That works well for async objects handled by worker

threads, however, it becomes a trouble for objects managed by user

threads. The thread may be used to do unrelated work for arbitrary

timespan, e.g. an hour, and during that time the object being managed by

it is completely stuck. Some unfortunate consequences are inability to

implemed request resending in REQ/REP protocol, PUB/SUB subscriptions

not being applied while application is doing other work and similar. In

nanomsg the objects are not tightly bound to particular threads and thus

these problems don't exist.

- REQ socket in ZeroMQ cannot be really used in real world environments

as they get stuck if message is lost due to service failure or similar.

Users have to use XREQ instead and implement the request re-trying

themselves. With nanomsg, the re-try functionality is built into REQ socket.

- In nanomsg, both REQ and REP support cancelling the ongoing

processing. Simply send a new request without waiting for a reply (in

the case of REQ socket) or grab a new request without replying to the

previous one (in the case of REP socket).

- In ZeroMQ, due to its threading model, bind-first-then-connect-second

scenario doesn't work for inproc transport. It is fixed in nanomsg.

- For similar reasons auto-reconnect doesn't work for inproc transport

in ZeroMQ. This problem is fixed in nanomsg as well.

- Finally, nanomsg attempts to make nanomsg sockets thread-safe. While

using a single socket from multiple threads in parallel is still

discouraged, the way in which ZeroMQ sockets failed randomly in such

circumstances proved to be painful and hard to debug.

State Machines --------------

Internal interactions inside the nanomsg library are modeled as a set of

state machines. The goal is to avoid the incomprehensible shutdown

mechanism as seen in ZeroMQ and thus make the development of the library

easier.

- For more discussion see http://250bpm.com/blog:24 and

IOCP Support ------------

One of the long-standing problems in ZeroMQ was that internally it uses

BSD socket API even on Windows platform where it is a second class

citizen. Using IOCP instead, as appropriate, would require major rewrite

of the codebase and thus, in spite of multiple attemps, was never

implemented. IOCP is supposed to have better performance characteristics

and, even more importantly, it allows to use additional transport

mechanisms such as NamedPipes which are not accessible via BSD socket

API. For these reasons nanomsg uses IOCP internally on Windows platforms.

Level-triggered Polling -----------------------

One of the aspects of ZeroMQ that proved really confusing for users was

the ability to integrate ZeroMQ sockets into an external event loops by

using ZMQ_FD file descriptor. The main source of confusion was that the

descriptor is edge-triggered, i.e. it signals only when there were no

messages before and a new one arrived. nanomsg uses level triggered file

descriptors instead that simply signal when there's a message available

irrespective of whether it was available in the past.

Routing Priorities ------------------

nanomsg implements priorities for outbound traffic. You may decide that

messages are to be routed to a particular destination in preference, and

fall back to an alternative destination only if the primary one is not

available.

- For more discussion see here: http://250bpm.com/blog:14 TCP Transport Enhancements --------------------------

There's a minor enhancement to TCP transport. When connecting, you can

optionally specify the local interface to use for the connection, like

this: nn_connect (s, "tcp://eth0;192.168.0.111:5555").

Asynchronous DNS ----------------

DNS queries (e.g. converting hostnames to IP addresses) are done in

asynchronous manner. In ZeroMQ such queries were done synchronously,

which meant that when DNS was unavailable the whole library, including

the sockets that haven't used DNS, just hung.

Zero-Copy ---------

While ZeroMQ offers a "zero-copy" API, it's not true zero-copy. Rather

it's "zero-copy till the message gets to the kernel boundary". From that

point on data are copied as with standard TCP. nanomsg, on the other

hand, aims at supporting true zero-copy mechanisms such as RDMA (CPU

by-pass, direct memory-to-memory copying) and shmem (transfer of data

between processes on the same box by using shared memory). The API

entrypoint for zero-copy messaging are nn_allocmsg and nn_freemsg

functions in combination with NN_MSG option passed to send/recv functions.

Efficient Subscription Matching -------------------------------

In ZeroMQ, simple tries are used to store and match PUB/SUB

subscriptions. The subscription mechanism was intended for up to 10,000

subscriptions where simple trie works well. However, there are users who

use as much as 150,000,000 subscriptions. In such cases there's a need

for a more efficient data structure. Thus, nanomsg uses memory-efficient

version of Patricia trie instead of simple trie.

- For more details check this article: http://250bpm.com/blog:19. Unified Buffer Model --------------------

ZeroMQ has a strange double-buffering behaviour. Both the outgoing and

incoming data are stored in a message queue AND in TCP's tx/rx buffers.

What it means, for example, is that if you want to limit the amount of

outgoing data, you have to set both ZMQ_SNDBUF and ZMQ_SNDHWM socket

options. Given that there's no semantic difference between the two,

nanomsg uses only TCP's (or equivalent's) buffers to store the data.

Scalability Protocols ---------------------

Finally, on philosophical level, nanomsg aims at implementing different

"scalability protocols" rather than being a generic networking.

Specifically:

- Different protocols are fully separated, you cannot connect REQ socket

to SUB socket or similar.

- Each protocol embodies a distributed algorithm with well-defined

prerequsites (e.g. "the service has to be stateless" in case of REQ/REP)

and guarantees (if REQ socket stays alive request will be ultimately

processed).

- Partial failure is handled by the protocol, not by the user. In fact,

it is transparent to the user.

- The specifications of the protocols are in /rfc subdirectory. - The goal is to standardise the protocols via IETF.

- There's no generic UDP-like socket (ZMQ_ROUTER), you should use L4

protocols for that kind of functionality.

Future Development ------------------ The most important features to be implemented in the future:

- TCP port multiplexing would allow to funnel all nanomsg communication

through a single TCP port.

- Monitoring tools. These would allow admins to locate and fix the

problems in nanomsg topologies, such as unavaialable endpoints, protocol

mismatches, node overload et c.

- IPC transport on Windows (via NamedPipes). Enjoy! Martin

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