Flakeless

Flakeless is a Javascript library and Node.js native addon for computing small, unique IDs for web applications. This is useful when incrementing primary keys are either not available (ex: in Cassandra or Neo4j) or not feasible at your current scale.

How it Works

The strategy for generating IDs is identical to how Twitter generates IDs with Snowflake. Flakeless is an implementation of their algorithm for Node.js. The primary benefit of Flakeless over the other Javascript implementations is that Flakeless was written as a native addon, so it has the ease of use of any other Javascript library but has the performance of C++.

The way Snowflake (and by proxy, Flakeless) works is by combining the following values:

• The time difference between the current time and the starting epoch in milliseconds. This accounts for the most significant 41 bits.

• A number signifying the computer generating the ID. This is the middle 10 bits, and is entirely arbitrary and is assigned by the user.

• A counter denoting how many other IDs have been generated in this millisecond. This accounts for the least significant 12 bits.

Installing

Before you install Flakeless, you first need to make sure that node-gyp is installed. Because Flakeless is written primarily in C++, it first needs to be compiled.

npm install -g node-gyp

Once node-gyp is installed, install Flakeless.

npm install ms-flakeless

Usage

Initialization:

const Flakeless = require('ms-flakeless');
const flakeless = new Flakeless({
  epochStart: Date.now(),
  outputType: 'base64',
  workerID: 71
});

epochStart is a number representing the start of the time period in milliseconds used to generate IDs. IDs will potentially begin repeating approximately 69 years after this date. This defaults to the beginning of the Unix epoch.

outputType is a string representing which alphabet to use when returning the ID. The options are base10 (using characters 0-9), base16 (using characters 0-9 and A-F), and base64 (using characters -, 0-9, A-Z, _, and a-z). Regardless of which format is specified, the output will always be a string. This defaults to base64.

workerID is an arbitrary identifier signifying the computer generating the IDs. This allows multiple computers to generate IDs without every needing to communicate state. The range for this is from 0 to 1023, and it defaults to 0 if not provided.

Generating an ID:

let id = flakeless.next();

Flakeless#next takes no arguments, and returns a string containing the next unique ID. Strings were used because Flakeless generates 63-bit IDs, and Javascript only supports up to 52-bit integers before precision declines.

Using the built-in Client and Server:

const Flakeless = require('flakeless').Flakeless;
const Client = require('flakeless').Client;
const Server = require('flakeless').Server;

const flakeless = new Flakeless;
const server = new Server(6000, function() {
  server.addGenerator('/a', flakeless);
});

const client = new Client('http://localhost:6000/a')
client.next().then(function(ids) {
  // use the IDs here
});

Performance

Preliminary benchmarks yield the following results:

Flakeless	Flakeless JS	node-snowflake	Date.now()
0.000099 ms/call	0.003470 ms/call	0.003870 ms/call	0.000069 ms/call
10101 calls/ms	288 calls/ms	258 calls/ms	14492 calls/ms

* All tests done by measuring the average time per call over 10,000,000 calls while outputting to base64, except for node-snowflake which only outputs decimal values and Date.now() which was used as a reference.

Roadmap

• Soon Flakeless will support providing custom times to Flakeless#next instead of using the current system clock in milliseconds.
• Eventually, Flakeless will support custom output formats that deviate from the provided 41-10-12 format, and will allow for the utilization of MAC addresses.

Contributing

If you think you can add useful features to Flakeless or can make it faster, please contribute! Most of the work here was done in a handful of days while learning how to use V8 and NAN, so there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.