Debangan Thakuria

A plain tour of every feature in Narad today, from sending your first message to copying a topic across clusters. What each one is for, how it works in a sentence or two, and which earlier post tells its story.

Since the last post, Narad got about twice as fast on one machine, learned to handle hundreds of thousands of messages a second in batches, and learned to copy a topic to a whole other cluster. Here's how, in plain words, with pictures.

Fast is nice. Trustworthy is the whole point of a message broker. This is the less flashy side of Narad 3: two audits that found over a hundred problems, an outage I caused with a 24-hour certificate, soak tests that ran for days, and the boring paperwork that makes a project safe to depend on.

I benchmarked Narad against Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis, and Pulsar on the same hardware, ran a Jepsen-style test on it, switched fsync to fdatasync after reading RabbitMQ's source, and got a 2x speedup that disappeared on the production cluster. Notes on what I measured and what I learned.

A CGDCT anime about girls fishing off a pier brought back my childhood summers in the village: bamboo rods, taro-stem floaters, leech bites, and my uncle who taught me all of it.