Playing with Jester

Jester is an http server framework for nim. It's extremely barebones.

There was a guy trying to get a plugin system into it, so he forked it. I wanted to try what he did.

Dependencies

• nim to compile (using 1.0.6 installed via choosenim)
• siege to benchmark (brew install siege)
• redis as a server (brew install redis)
• just to run some scripts (brew install just)
• fd for finding files (brew install fd)
• entr for watching files and rerunning scripts (brew install entr)
• curl for hitting pages (already installed)

How to run

Build and run:

nimble install
just release

Then make sure redis-server is running.

And use redis-cli to set steve hello which will "seed" the "database". :7

To run the app:

bin/jesterplugins

Results

I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing.

Computer specs:

• MBP MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
• 2.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
• 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
• 10.15.3

Single threaded, read speeds when fetching 1 key from redis:

❯ just bench                                                                                        0.012s
** SIEGE 4.0.4
** Preparing 8 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...

Transactions:                   8000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                   0.89 secs
Data transferred:               0.52 MB
Response time:                  0.00 secs
Transaction rate:            8988.76 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.58 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    7.79
Successful transactions:        8000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.01
Shortest transaction:           0.00

Single threaded, writes to redis are hitting 5,000 transactions per second. Wild!

❯ just bench-status-write                                                                           0.813s

** SIEGE 4.0.4
** Preparing 8 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...

Transactions:                   8000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                   1.58 secs
Data transferred:               0.12 MB
Response time:                  0.00 secs
Transaction rate:            5063.29 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.08 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    7.82
Successful transactions:        8000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.23
Shortest transaction:           0.00

CPU load is around 50% under load. Redis hits 100%. Memory spikes to 8.5 MB! Then settles back to 7.4 MB. I cannot believe this. Amazing.

Code

I like the idea of plugins. I'm not too sold on the API design, but it is def working. I had a few issues with all the macro stuff and the error messages, but ultimately figured it out.

I've never used an export command in nim before, so that took getting used to.

I tried the subrouter command, and really didn't care for it. I can see how it might be useful in a larger app though.