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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

goodluck with zmq. I've had pretty bad experience using zmq in production.

It seems like people are either very enthusiastic or very disappointed by zeromq. What were your pain points, if I may ask?

I hit the following issues: memory leak, hard to debug, silent disconnects.

How could you get memory leaks? It seems to me that only a very immature library should leak memory if the interface is being used correctly.

ZeroMQ is a C++ library written by a guy who hates C++:

http://250bpm.com/blog:4

He later rewrote the whole thing in C:

http://nanomsg.org/

We've also had memory leaks - not sure of the exact issue, but it's related to large scale reconnects. https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/issues/1256

Yep. Every few days the process was oom killed because of that. When we moved away from it and used OS sockets directly, everything worked fine.

Not necessarily. It's not a good idea to assume that the library you are using is perfect and free of bugs.

OSes and popular OSS libraries have ridiculous bugs sometimes.

At least it isn't Zookeeper. Our Zookeeper cluster was the biggest PITA I've ever dealt with.

Could you explain what specifically goes wrong with ZK clusters? I keep hearing how people have issues with it, but we've been running one for ~4 months now with absolutely 0 issues.

While I've found ZK to be a massive pain, at the same time I've also found it to be the closest to actually delivering what they promise.

It's less a silver bullet, more really bad tasting werewolf repellent you have to take every 2 hours.

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