[ravloony]

anecdote incoming!

In my previous gig, we had a premium website hosting platform, and our incoming clients would usually want their old inbound links to keep working. Over time, this meant a few hundred thousand autogenerated rewrite rules in Nginx. This was causing Nginx to use about 10G of memory, so restarting it, which we had to do every time we added a redirect, was an issue.

I replaced this with a small reverse proxy written in rust that loaded all of the redirects from postgresql into a cuckoo filter. Adding a redirect was an INSERT, followed by a NOTIFY to let the proxy know to add the redirect to the filter.

Putting it all together took about 2 weeks of swearing at the compiler, but it never had an issue in production, and used about 1M of memory, while adding less than 1ms of latency, or about 4ms in case of a filter hit. Cuckoo filters can have false positives, so if a redirect was found, we still had to check in the db table before returning 301.

As far as I know it's still working fine, and I use rust whenever I can.

[mleonard]

Interesting! Any chance you can share a few tips to get started doing the same? (eg any crates to use or other tips). I'm currently looking for a rust learning project and building what you described really hits the mark!