hashring by Arnout Kazemier is a JavaScript implementation of the Consistent Hashing algorythm. If you don’t know exactly what that is and not into reading dry Wikipedia articles, watch this 3 minute video for a pretty good overview of what’s going on.
hashring also compatible with the original libketama library that was developed at last.fm as well as with the hash_ring module for Python.
npm install hashring
Usage
'use strict';
var HashRing = require('hashring');
var ring = new HashRing({
'127.0.0.1:11211': { vnodes: 50 },
'127.0.0.2:11211': { vnodes: 200 },
'127.0.0.3:11211': { vnodes: 100 }
});
console.log(ring.get('npmawesome'));
// 127.0.0.2:11211
console.log(ring.get('http://...'));
// 127.0.0.3:11211
console.log(ring.range('http://...', 2));
// [ '127.0.0.3:11211', '127.0.0.1:11211' ]
This can be immensly useful for caching or distributing data to multiple servers. Weights or vnodes are used to give servers a bigger distribution in the hashring. For example if you have 3 servers where you want to distribute your keys over but not all servers are equal in capacity as 2 of those machines have 200mb of memory and the other has 3.2 gig of memory. The last server is substantially bigger and there for should receive a greater distrubtion in the ring.
What Else?
Unfortunately hashring relies on C imlementation and therefore can’t be used in the browsers.
The module now requires a C++ compiler to be installed on your server as hashing the value requires support for 64bit bitshifting and JavaScript as a language only supports 32bit bitshifting.
Checkout the runnable example and github example repository. Have you seen other modules along these lines? Please let us know in the comments!