Pelichan

A persistent buffered channel.

Current state is: beta-testing

GoDoc

Pelichan provides an easy-to-use persistent(disk-buffered) channel-like structure, with an emphasis on minimization of message loss and allowing graceful application restart.

Features

• Disk storage used as last resort, when forwarding buffer is full
• Graceful stopping and restarting without buffered messages loss (hopefully)
• Statistics
• Ordering of messages are totally not guaranteed
• Backed by leveldb (and github.com/beeker1121/goque)

Use cases

• Log sending applications

  You can tunnel your log message flow through Pelichan to temporary store them on local drive in case of network outage or maintenance downtime of log receiver.

• Other...

How to Use

type MyMsg struct {
    content string
}

...

// Channel that will produce MyMsg messages
var rawMsgSource chan interface{} = getMyMsgSource()

...


// Function to map stored messages from `interface{}` back to desired type
var mapFn = func(item *goque.Item) (interface{}, error) {
    var msg MyMsg 
    err := item.ToObject(&msg)
	if err != nil {
    	return nil, err
	}
    return obj, nil
}

dbc, bufMsgSource, err := pelichan.NewDiskBufferedChan(
	"./leveldb/",                   // Dir where leveldb with stored data will be
	100,                            // Size of the bufMsgSource channel
	mapFn,                          // Mapping function
	rawMsgSource,                   // Channel from where dbc will read messages
)
if err != nil {
	panic("Failed to initialize dbc")
}
defer dbc.Close()

// Read buffered channel routine
go func() {
    for msg := range bufMsgSource {
        fmt.Printf("Got message: %s\n", msg.content)
    }
}()

// Other tasks are performed meanwhile...
time.Sleep(30 * time.Second)

// Note that pelichan will cease reading of source on halt, it's
// user's concern to ensure that no messages buffered in this chan
close(rawMsgSource)     // don't do that in real life, you should
                        // signal `getMyMsgSource()` to stop&close instead
dbc.Halt()

If your source/sink channels are not of chan interface{} type, you can use sample anon/deanon chan functions to workaround that.

func anonChan(src chan MyMsg) (chan interface{}) {
    ch := make(chan interface{})
	go func() {
    	defer close(ch)
	    for v := range src {
			ch <- v
    	}
	}()
    return ch
}

func deanonChan(src <-chan interface{}) (chan MyMsg) {
	ch := make(chan MyMsg)
	go func() {
		defer close(ch)
    	for v := range src {
	    	ch <- v.(MyMsg)
    	}
	}()
    return ch
}

...

dbc, bufMsgSource, err := pelichan.NewDiskBufferedChan(
	"./leveldb/",
	100,
	mapFn,
	anonChan(rawMsgSource),
)

var src chan MySrc = deanonChan(bufMsgSource)

Notes

• Be aware, that Pelichan is a potential bottleneck in your application, (although it tries not to) because of it disk-backed nature. Ensure that you underlying storage have enough performance to allow leveldb to store whole planned incoming data stream.
• Also note that after restart leveldb will be reading stored messages in parallel with storing them, which will introduce even more disk load.
• Pelichan doesn't protect in-flight data from loss in case of application crash because it uses disk only when in-memory buffer are full in order to maximize performance. If you need to store ALL messages on persistent storage you can use github.com/beeker1121/goque which provides a fully disk-backed FIFO structure.