[HN Gopher] Why /Dev/Null Is an Acid Compliant Database
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Why /Dev/Null Is an Acid Compliant Database
Author : swills
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-10-23 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jyu.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (jyu.dev)
| cluckindan wrote:
| Always instantly consistent, always available, and perfectly
| tolerant of partitioning.
|
| Truly, it is the only database which can be scaled to unlimited
| nodes and remain fully CAP.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's really fast too.
| ozim wrote:
| I guess we have a perfect idea for vaporware here. (pun
| intended)
|
| I am putting my marketing hat on right now.
| pasteldream wrote:
| Reminds me of Falso.
|
| https://inutile.club/estatis/falso/
| the_jeremy wrote:
| You've been beaten to the punch: https://devnull-as-a-
| service.com/
| tgma wrote:
| Always available? Clearly you have not experienced situations
| with no /dev mounted.
| pasteldream wrote:
| One easy way to create such a situation is to use bwrap
| without --dev.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I've used /dev/null for exactly this purpose. I have output that
| needs to go somewhere, and I don't want to worry about whether
| that somewhere can handle it.
|
| Later on in deployment, it will go somewhere else. Somewhere that
| has been evaluated for being able to handle it.
|
| In that way, /dev/null is to storage what `true` is to execution
| - it just works.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| Bug free software is a pipe dream, but if there is anything
| I've never encountered any bugs with, /dev/null and true is
| certainly in the top 3.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Joking aside I can't ever remember seeing a bug in either
| bash or zsh, never seen either crash or segfault and anytime
| I've had weirdness it's always turned out to be me missing
| something.
|
| Both (along with a lot of the standard utilities) are a
| testament to what talented C programmers plus years of people
| beating on them in unintended ways can achieve in terms of
| reliability/stability.
| imcritic wrote:
| How does a disaster recovery plan with it look like?
| tadfisher wrote:
| There is never a disaster; reading from /dev/null will return
| the same result before and after any external event.
| rezonant wrote:
| But is /dev/null web scale?
| epistasis wrote:
| Yes, /dev/null can even power sites like zombo.com
| bottled_poe wrote:
| What's the I/O throughput of /dev/null ?
| epistasis wrote:
| Single client, I'm getting ~5GB/s, both on an 8-year-old
| intel server, and on my M1 ARM chip.
|
| However with a single server, it doesn't perfectly linearly
| scale with multiple clients. I'm getting
|
| 1 client: 5GB/s
|
| 2 clients: 8GB/s
|
| 3 client: 8.7GB/s
| fukka42 wrote:
| I'm easily reaching 30GB/s with a single client:
| dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M status=progress
|
| A second dd process hits the same speed.
| dinkelberg wrote:
| How did you measure this? Do you know that /dev/null is
| the limiting factor, or could it be the data source that
| is limiting?
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| You start dealing with Heisen-throughput at that point, it
| goes as high as you can measure.
| pasteldream wrote:
| reference for the unaware:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| QuiCasseRien wrote:
| Fast and easy to read, funny and fuckingly true !
|
| best post of the week ^^
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