oneup

NIF powered, lock-free global counters for erlang using the c++11 atomic package.

Oneup is an alternative to ets:update_counter with improved throughput for multiple writers without the lock contention that can happen with ets.

Status

oneup is not currently used in production and is subject to API changes.

Usage

Create a new counter. This returns a reference that is required for further oneup operations. There is no public registry of oneup counters. Oneup counters are garbage collected like any other erlang primitive e.g. binary or tuple.

C = oneup:new_counter().

Increment or set the counter. Any number of processes can safely increment or set a counter. A 64 bit signed long is used to hold the value, not an erlang auto number. The maximum value is (2^63-1) or less depending on architecture.

ok = oneup:inc(C).              %% value of C becomes 1
ok = oneup:inc2(C, 10).         %% value of C becomes 11
11 = oneup:set(C, 200).         %% set to 200 and return previous value
201 = oneup:inc_and_get(C).     %% value of C becomes 201
401 = oneup:inc_and_get(C,200). %% value of C becomes 401

Set min or max.

300 = oneup:set_max(C, 300). %% set to max of current and new value and return max
300 = oneup:set_max(C, 100).
100 = oneup:set_min(C, 100). %% set to min of current and new value and return min
100 = oneup:set_min(C, 300).

Retrieve the result. Any number of processes can safely read a counter.

200 = oneup:get(C).

Performance

The benchnmark suite can be run by executing the following from the oneup directory:

make perfs

This runs a benchmarks of oneup and ets:update_counter tests. Testing has shown that oneup can achieve upto 100 times the throughput of ets when multiple processes write to a single key.