nsqd: Use Klaus Post's compression libraries

[philpearl]

We would quite like to use compression with NSQ to save on data transfer costs, but the CPU impact is higher than we'd like. Our experiments have shown that Klaus Post's compression libraries perform much better than the standard library Deflate and Google's Snappy, with the sweet spot appearing to be level 3 flate compressing our traffic to about 25% of its original size, but only incurring a CPU cost equivalent to Snappy.

Would there be any interest in taking a PR that makes this change?

[mreiferson]

At a glance, I don't see any fundamental problem with improving performance by swapping out the dependency. Should we also expose the other compression algorithms, too?

[adamroyjones]

I think that's an excellent idea. zstd in particular has a strong appeal to it.

It's especially appealing with NSQ as it seems like a common pattern is for a topic to have messages with a single, well-defined schema—variations on a theme. Dictionaries (as generated by zstd --train) could be very useful.

[philpearl]

Fabulous. I'll put together a PR for the dependency swap.

[philpearl]

Hmm, I think our original testing must have been flawed when looking at Snappy. The Klaus Post version of this seems to be slower than the Google version, and the Klaus Post Deflate doesn't reach the speed of Snappy at any level.

This is what I'm getting comparing replacing Snappy & Deflate in both NSQD and the Go NSQ library

name                  old time/op    new time/op    delta
Compress/snappy-16       272µs ± 2%     310µs ± 7%  +13.96%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
Compress/deflate3-16     746µs ± 1%     612µs ± 2%  -17.91%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
Compress/deflate5-16    1.06ms ± 1%    0.66ms ± 1%  -37.60%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)
Compress/deflate6-16    1.28ms ± 2%    0.73ms ± 5%  -43.46%  (p=0.000 n=9+10)
Compress/deflate9-16    1.47ms ± 4%    1.72ms ± 9%  +16.33%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)

There's also an added complication that the Klaus Post Deflate compresses a little less at most levels.

=== RUN   TestCompareDeflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 1: compress to 19.304255% - 98.069603% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 2: compress to 18.701276% - 104.756670% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 3: compress to 18.185710% - 103.829701% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 4: compress to 16.835251% - 105.500279% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 5: compress to 16.005709% - 103.914756% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 6: compress to 15.584694% - 103.055326% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 7: compress to 15.575774% - 103.398863% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 8: compress to 15.233253% - 101.558040% of Go deflate
    protocol_v2_test.go:2056: deflate level 9: compress to 14.929979% - 99.571684% of Go deflate
--- PASS: TestCompareDeflate (0.02s)

I still think it's worth replacing the Deflate library, but the motivation is much less than I previously believed. WDYT?

[mreiferson]

Meh, doesn't seem worth it? It sounds like we're saying "just use snappy"?

We should land all the benchmark code improvements (I've pushed a few more up to your PR), and nsqio/go-nsq#362 though.