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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

The comparison with Redis is on page 10, and (obviously) takes into account the number of threads. It is a bit presumptuous to post a comment like this without minimal effort, please don’t.

Regarding embedded processing, it’s very easy to embed whatever single-threaded language you’d like into C: Lua, Javascript or something new like Gravity. This is orthogonal to the storage / network architecture.

A better argument would be on the extra operations and data structures that Redis offers, not being a simple key-value store.

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The comparison to Redis is in the 4th paragraph of the linked article. "The paper includes numbers showing it beating Redis by over 10x on a single AWS instance"

I'm sorry I didn't go read the original paper, but I thought reading the article qualified me to comment. Sorry dad.

I think you also misunderstood my point about Lua. Embedded Lua in Redis is so powerful BECAUSE it is single threaded, not because it is just snazzy to have an embedded language. That with the primitives Redis provides allows you to build your own domain specific data structures with their own custom semantics that just aren't possible in other systems without rolling your own. And you can do it simply.

That Anna is faster is great, but it comes with its own set of constraints, I don't think I would be wrong in saying that includes you not having exclusive access to the data while you are in an embedded script running on the store.

> "The paper includes numbers showing it beating Redis by over 10x on a single AWS instance"

Right single core against single core,the best scenario for Redis, and Anna's an order of magnitude faster. I'm not sure what you don't find impressive about this.

Ahem. Single AWS instance does not equal single core.

See my earlier note, it is a bit apples to oranges. Redis is not optimized for throughput on a machine, it is optimized for throughput on a single core. And that property allows lots of interesting things due not having any parallelism.

They are different tools and they have different performance characteristics. My only point was that comparing against Redis is somewhat misguided due to those differing goals.

The article is comparing the [new] underlying architecture of a key-value store, which Redis also is (and one of the fastest). The other features are irrelevant for the comparison. “Anna” is a proof of concept, not a competing product.

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