Simon Willison’s Weblog

Building a GeoIP server with ZeroMQ. ZeroMQ makes it trivially easy to write a network service in raw C that makes functionality from a C library (in this case the MaxMind GeoIP library) available to clients written in many different client languages.

# 9th November 2010, 9:36 am / c, geoip, zeromq, recovered

ZeroMQ: Modern and Fast Networking Stack. I get ZeroMQ now. I was having trouble figuring out how it differed from things like RabbitMQ—it turns out it’s an entirely new low-level socket abstraction, designed to make common socket programming tasks like message sending/receiving and publish/subscribe a whole lot easier than dealing with raw BSD sockets.

# 5th September 2010, 7:41 pm / io, messaging, networking, sockets, zeromq, recovered

Mongrel2 is “Self-Hosting”. Zed Shaw’s Mongrel2 is shaping up to be a really interesting project. “A web server simply written in C that loves all languages equally”, the two most interesting new ideas are the ability to handle HTTP, Flash Sockets and WebSockets all on the same port (thanks to an extension to the Mongrel HTTP parser that can identify all three protocols) and the ability to hook Mongrel2 up to the backend servers using either TCP/IP or ZeroMQ. I’m guessing this means Mongrel2 could hold an HTTP request open, fire off some messages and wait for various backends to send messages back to construct the response, making async processing just as easy as a regular blocking request/response cycle.

# 17th June 2010, 8:11 pm / async, c, http, mongrel2, webserver, zed-shaw, zeromq, recovered, websockets

ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second.

# 27th July 2008, 4:57 pm / messaging, zeromq, performance, message-queues