codibre/nodejs-grpc-mutex-api repository overview

This is a simple distributed mutex implementation that uses only memory and the own nodejs event loop to work.

⁠How to use it

Get a Docker image from Docker hub⁠ and create a grpc client using proto/mutex.proto⁠. You can also use one of the clients already provided by us:

• NodeJs client⁠;

You have two methods to use: acquire, which will try to lock a server side mutex and return a payload with an UUID to be used during its releasing. The acquire method can also receive a waitTimeout, so you can define how long you want to wait for the acquiring before receiving a DEADLINE EXCEEDED error, and also a mutexTimeout, to define how long the mutex will endure server side without your explicit release, before expiring.

You also have the release method, where you need to inform the acquire response to release a server mutex. It's important to always call it after your operation to prevent long locks.

Finally, notice that this api is a memory only implementation, so it doesn't fit to be scaled horizontally: you need to have only one instance to process all your mutexes for a set of clients. To deal with that, you can have multiple instances, each one with a distinct set os clients, but have in mind that, even if it doesn't support auto scaling yet, it's extremely low memory and can deal with a lot of simultaneous locks before dying. During our tests, we could create up to 230 thousands simultaneous locks, with a average (local) response time of 0.64 ms, using a instance with memory limitation of 468MB. For comparison, running on the same machine using redis-semaphore⁠, with a local redis, we achieved the same acquire time.

⁠Source code

github⁠

⁠License

Licensed under MIT⁠.