Last year I had a chance to talk about the internals of our service: Pathtraq at Percona Performance Conference (slides), in which I described the methods we use to compress the URLs in our database to below 40% of the original size, however had not released the source code since then.  I am sorry for the delay, but have finally uploaded the code to github.com/kazuho/url_compress.

It is generally considered difficult to achieve high ratio for compressing short texts.  This is due to the fact that most compression algorithms are adaptive, i.e., short texts reach their end before the compressors learn how to encode them …

I am sure many programmers writing network applications have their own abstracting layers hiding the differences between various I/O multiplex APIs, like select(2), poll(2), epoll(2), ... And of course, I am one among them.  While writing mycached (see Mycached: memcached protocol support for MySQL for more information), I was at first considering of using libev for multiplexing socket I/Os.  Libevent was not an option since it does not (yet) provide multithreading support.

But it was a great pain for me to learn how to use libev.  I do not mean that its is an ugly product.  In fact, I think that it is a very well written, excellent library.  However, for me it was too much a …