Understanding The React Source Code (Republished)

Component Mount (Straight, Upper Half)UI updating, in its essential, is data change. React offers a straightforward and intuitive approach to front-end program with all the moving parts converged in the form of states. Code review is also made easier to me as I like to start with data structures for a rough expectation of the functionalities and processing logic. From time to time, I was curious about how React works internally, hence this article. It never hurts to have a deeper understanding down the stack, as it gives me more freedom when I need a new feature, more confidence when I want to contribute and more comfort when I upgrade.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - Consistent Hashing

slab allocator (I, II, III) is the core module of the cache system, which largely determines how efficient the bottleneck resource, memory, can be utilized. The other 3 parts, namely, LRU algorithm (I , II , III) for entry expiration; and an event driven model (I , II , III) based on libevent; and consistent hashing - this article for data distribution, are built around it. We have covered most of the mechanisms of memcached itself. We now know that memcached is a pure single-node, in-memory cache system and each memcached instance doesn’t know about each other. Hence clients need to deal with load balance themselves. As a load balance mechanism, Hashing has intrincit problem when applied to storage layer. As a result, variances such as consistent hashing are used instead. In addtion, Rendezvous is also used to tackle one drawback of consistent hashing. This post focuses on consistent hashing.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - Event Driven III

We continue examining the other two operations, i.e., create and delete, in the event driven context. As usual, we start with a command sent to a Memcached server. In fact, most of the logic involved in this post has been discussed before such as in LRU III and Event Driven II. Hence this post will only resolve the missing parts and linking points.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - Event Driven II

In classic multithreading, blocking I/O operations constrain the maximum number of requests a server can handle. Hence asynchronous event driven model is used to eliminate the throughput bottleneck. As such, the synchronous and potentially slow process is divided into logic segments that are free of I/O, and are executed asynchronously. When it comes to asynchronization, extra space is required to store contexts. This is because the logic segments, that could be associated with different sessions, are executed in an interleaved way. For instance, in the case when asynchronization is implemented (emulated) using synchronous multithreading, the “extra space” is in the form of thread stack. Whilst contexts are maintained in user land in event driven.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - Event Driven I

In classic multithreading, large amounts of slow and blocking operations, mostly, I/O, can easily drain out available thread resources, which severely constrains the maximum number of requests a server can handle per unit time. More specific, threads are scheduled out and put into sleep in the middle of procedures that contain blocking I/O, despite piling up requests packets queuing within the network stack. In such situation, server side will show low throughput, low CPU saturation and high latency.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - LRU III

In previous posts, we have discussed different facets of an item, i.e., slab, hash map and LRU list as well as their associated (CRUD) methods, which build up the internal procedures and perform client requests after the corresponding commands are parsed by the drive machine. This time we will go through those procedures by issuing telnet commands to a Memcached instance and see how the discussed modules work together on various item operations. We will also see the whole picture of LRU lists that maintain the property of ‘least recently used’ in accordance to those operations.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - LRU II

More often than not, the LRU algorithm is combined with a hash map, and is referred to as a LRU cache. In a LRU-cache, the hash map enables fast accessing of cached objects; and LRU avoids the cache to grow infinitely by marking expired, or so called, least recently used objects. This time we examine the memcached‘s implementation of hash map.

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Understanding The Memcached Source Code - Slab II

This time we continue examining how slabs memory is allocated. Firstly we look at the two arguments for slabs_init, which were passed over in the previous article. The first one is settings.maxbytes. It limits the overall memory that can be used by the memcached instance. In slabs_init, the value of settings.maxbytes is assigned to the global variable mem_limit which will be used very soon. The other argument is preallocate. It determines whether to preallocate slab for each slab class. This argument is toggled with L command line argument.

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