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Rendezvous Hashing: an alternative to Consistent Hashing

In any kind of stateful distributed system, the problem of mapping a key to a set of machines is pretty common. Even if a distributed system is stateless, you might still want to map a key to the same set of machines for better…

Sampling — the good, the bad, and the ugly

Benjamin Franklin once said — “Those who give up essential accuracy for temporary speed deserve neither speed nor accuracy”. In the real world, however, you frequently have to trade off one for the other. This tradeoff becomes increasingly appealing as…

Map iteration in Go

While the Go programming language specification only states that the iteration order over maps is not guaranteed to be the same across…

Common traps while using defer in go

The defer statement in go is really handy in improving code readability. However, in some cases its behavior is confusing and not immediately obvious. Even after writing go for over 2 years, there are times when a defer in the wild leaves me scratching my head. My…

Memory Mapped Files

Memory mapping of files is a very powerful abstraction that many operating systems support out of the box. Linux does this via the mmap system call. In most cases where an application reads (or writes) to a file at arbitrary positions, using mmap is a solid alternative to the more traditional…