This is my last week on my current job, and I was reflecting about some of the things that I've learned in the past 7 years there. There's a lot of course! As a staff data engineer, I worked with many teams and codebases and learned a couple of tricks at scale. So I'm starting a new blog series "performance advice nugget" (or PAN for short), in which I'll share some insights of what worked quite well in practice.

So welcome to PAN 01: use flat representations.

I'll try to make these posts quite short. As usual with everything related to "performance", you should always measure and benchmark with your real workload, and always balance whether additional complexity is worth the performance gains.

Nice, forewords are said and out of the way. Let's focus on the matter: imagine that you are handling a data that has multiple levels, for example, a paragraph, that is made of sentences, each made of words, each made of characters:

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Happy pi day! (not to be confused with pie day, which has more pastry but is less sweat).

I need your help: please refresh this page to throw more matches to the ground!
I'll use Comte de Buffon's result to estimate π.

The underlying relation is:

                          2 * match_size
P(match_crosses_a_line) = --------------
                           π * line_gap

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In Rust, the tokio's ecosystem has a fundamental crate called bytes that abstracts and helps dealing with bytes (you don't say!). I've indirectly used it a billion times and I thought that I had a good mental model of how it worked.

So, in the spirit of the "decrusting" series by the excellent Jon Gjengset, I've decided to peek behind the curtains to understand more what axum, tokio, hyper and the kind do to them bytes! The code is well written, but surprisingly complex. I understand now what it does, but I still don't fully grasp why it does some things in a certain way.

I'm ready to share with you my discoveries. I hope that you are sitting, laying or squatting comfortably. This is the first post in a small series. I'm legally required by my marketing department to remind you that you can subscribe to my low-traffic newsletter, so that you'll know when new posts are up!

A quick note before we start: this posts is based on the current bytes version 1.11.1.

What the Bytes?

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This blog is written in Rust, and I wanted a way to reload the web pages automatically while I change the posts' contents, styles, etc. This is common-place with JavaScript frameworks, but not automatic in the Rust land. So I've embarked on a side quest to achieve just that: the "type and auto-reload" experience. In the end, I was surprised to learn a bit more about sockets and processes in Linux.

This post is a note to myself about these nuggets that I've learned and to share the solution. It may be helpful for future me and I hope for someonelse out there.

TL;DR

You can check the solution here: https://git.sitegui.dev/sitegui/axum-web-auto-reload-example/src/branch/main/src/main.rs. The README in that repo has some nice diagrams as well.

Shopping list

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