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by rubiquity16 hours ago |
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upvoteby fl0ki15 hours ago|
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etcd is some of the most amateur code I've ever seen, despite being one of the oldest and presumably most mature "infrastructure" projects written in Go.

goBGP is arguably even worse.

I don't have a third place in mind that's even worth mentioning relative to these two.

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upvoteby alfons_foobar13 hours ago|
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just curious, what problems do you see with gobgp?

(I have only a rather basic familiarity with go, but was considering gobgp for an infra project...)

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upvoteby iscoelho9 hours ago|
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Not speaking to their code, but to start GoBGP has the worst performance of any BGP daemon by a large margin [1].

[1] https://elegantnetwork.github.io/posts/comparing-open-source...

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upvoteby preisschild3 hours ago|
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Garbage collected languages like Go will always have worse performance than lower level languages like C (frr and bird are implemented in C).

Gobgp is great if you want to embed it directly into a Go app though. Talos Linux has done that recently.

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upvoteby tsss22 minutes ago|
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No they won't. They are generally faster in throughput than any non-gc application that isn't heavily hand optimized. Their problems are higher memory usage and unpredictable latency, not speed.
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upvoteby camkego15 hours ago|
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Sorry to pile on, but yeah, I wanted to use etcd during 2021 and 2022, around v3.5, but etcd had serious issues including silent data corruption. If you are curious, ask gemini flash "there were a number of etcd releases years ago where it seems a new wave of developers came in and started breaking everything"
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upvoteby Thaxll15 hours ago|
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I'd like to know what you base your statement on that the Raft implementations in etcd or CockroachDB are incorrect. Your original paper does not mention those implementations, so where does that claim come from?
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upvoteby gyesxnuibh11 hours ago|
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Having run a fleet of 100s of etcd clusters for 10000s of rps, and the fact that upstream runs tests similar to antithesis and recently partnered with antithesis [0], and jepsen has tested it long ago as well [1]. Etcd's raft algorithm is fine. Someone even did a TLA+ proof on it in the last couple years[2]. Yes there was a correctness issue a few years ago but otherwise the person you're replying to doesn't know what they're talking about. Also those bugs have nothing to do with the raft implementation, but instead the state machine implemented on top.

0: https://etcd.io/blog/2025/autonomus_testing_with_antithesis/

1: https://jepsen.io/analyses/etcd-3.4.3

2: https://github.com/etcd-io/raft/pull/113

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upvoteby dnautics1 hours ago|
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doesnt raft have a problem that it assumes no hysteresis? and that in general you can construct a latency graph that deterministically causes a permanent lock in the leadership election phase?
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upvoteby cobbzilla9 hours ago|
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Is the correctness of its implementation of the algorithm unaffected by bugs in this state machine? Maybe I missed something.
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upvoteby gyesxnuibh8 hours ago|
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The raft algorithm works and if you implemented a less complex state machine (like using a simpler kv store that doesn't need global event ordering via revisions and watches) it would work. That's what antithesis said they did to test the raft algorithms in the other article linked
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upvoteby iscoelho8 hours ago|
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"there was a correction issue" is downplaying it. Etcd is truly the worst example of Raft.

Etcd corruption and loss of quorum is extremely common in practice and the GitHub issues sit for years. The design is simple, the performance is modest, yet it still has still never been reliable, despite being marketed as so. I can't speak to whether this is specifically due to their Raft implementation, but I'd argue the entire codebase is over-engineered and questionable.

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upvoteby AlphaSite7 hours ago|
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My beef with etcd is that its neither performant nor reliable.

Its very much {reliable, performant, flexible} pick none.

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upvoteby gyesxnuibh8 hours ago|
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Their lock, leader election, sessions, and leases are all awful and I'd never recommend anyone to use those. But as a strongly consistent kv store and if you need the watch mechanics, its useful. It has its place and that's mostly being used by kubernetes.
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