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In search of a fast database. (sorry raft authors) Kevin Leung November 2025 Why I’m Building This So I saw pogocache by tidwall - it’s this insanely fast in-memory cache that beats Redis, Memcached, basically everything. The benchmarks are ridiculous. It’s got all these cool optimizations: sharded hashmap, Robin Hood hashing, crazy-low latency. And I thought: I want to build a cache in C too. Around the same time, someone I know mentioned this recent VLDB 2025 paper about Local Reads and Linearizable Asynchronous Replication. ...

So, I was going down a ton of rabbit holes for distributed computing instead of doing my homework and I spotted something neat, where someone mentioned that Kafka has tail latency problems. I thought that it was interesting, so I researched a bit more and found this apparently applies to all (most) streaming tools. What I found So, I first I found a case study with Allegro basically Amazon Poland, where they found that their Kafka median response times were single-digit milliseconds, and their p99 latency was up to 1 second, and p999 was up by 3 seconds. Personally, I think it’s hilarious being that unlucky user waiting 3 seconds for what usually takes a fraction of that. ...