Lander

The idea

A URL shortener has always been on my list of things I'd like to write myself. It's simple, yet useful.

for our Algorithms & Datastructures 3 class, we had to implement three different tries (Patricia trie, ternary trie, and a custom one). Considering these are efficient string-based search trees, this gave me the idea to use it as the backend for a URL shortener!

This implementation currently uses a ternary trie as its search tree. The persistence model is very simple; I simply append a line to a text file every time a URL is added, and add the lines of this file to the trie on startup. The trie is stored completely im memory, and no I/O operations are required when requesting a redirect. This makes the server very fast.

The name

I gave up giving my projects original names a long time ago, so now I just use the names of my friends ;p

Benchmarking

I benchmark this tool using the wrk2 utility. I've provided two Lua scripts to aid with this. To bench publishing redirects, use the following:

wrk2 -s bench/post.lua -t 10 -R 10k -d30s -c32 http://localhost:18080

And to bench GET requests:

wrk2 -s bench/get.lua -t 10 -R 25k -d30s -c32 http://localhost:18080

Of course you're free to change the parameters, but the provided Lua files generate URLs that can be used in the benchmark.