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Actix-web in used in production at Cloudflare for the image resizing feature. It's been relatively easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with the rest o

by pornel 7y ago

Actix-web in used in production at Cloudflare for the image resizing feature. It's been relatively easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with the rest of Cloudflare's stack. Feels vaguely similar to Node's express. Along with Rust it's a great fit for a service that needs to have high performance, tight memory usage with very low risk of leaks, integration with existing libraries, and a good security story.

_bxg1 7y ago
I've been experimenting with Iron/Router: https://github.com/iron/router https://github.com/iron/router Do you know how it compares?
- staticassertion 7y ago
  I don't think Iron is even supported anymore, but for one thing, last I checked, Iron was based on OS threads primarily whereas Actix has a (I believe) pluggable runtime, which supports async.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Ah really? That's surprising, as Iron seemed to be the go-to for what it does. I guess that's just a symptom of a nascent ecosystem.
    - GrayShade 7y ago
      Iron has a rather baroque API and was pretty much unmaintained for a very long time.
      - EugeneOZ 7y ago
        and it still serve my servers pretty well, few years already.
  - shepmaster 7y ago
    Iron had a long quiet period, but it does have updates recently (a commit 12 days ago, for example).
    - staticassertion 7y ago
      Oh neat, I wasn't aware. Thank you.
littlestymaar 7y ago
> Actix-web in used in production at Cloudflare for the image resizing feature. Oh, that's really interesting. I actually used it for exactly the same purpose, but I was a bit disappointed by the image[1] crate for the image-resizing itself: it was several times slower than imagemagick (it was less the case on my decktop, when compiled with `target-cpu=native`, but on my low-end server many SIMD instructions weren't available and auto-vectorized code wasn't that efficient) and the image quality was also way poorer. Did you use that crate for the image processing ? Or imagemagick ? Or something you wrote internally ? [1]: https://github.com/image-rs/image https://github.com/image-rs/image
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I'm curious about this as well.
- kbenson 7y ago
  Did you try looking for Rust bindings to ImageMagick? If it's really that much faster, it might make sense to just call out to it. I found https://github.com/nlfiedler/magick-rust https://github.com/nlfiedler/magick-rust with e quick search, but I don't know how well it works.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    It was much faster (between 3 and 5 times) but performance wasn't a critical part on this project, the ease of use and deployment was higher on the list. Also, I'm not sure I would trust imagemagick enough anymore to put it on a web-facing server, since its security track record doesn't smell that good [1]. But I was still disappointed by the poor performance of the `image` library because Rust has shown in many areas that it has potential to write code which is as fast as C, and in this case it didn't deliver. [1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1749&product_id=&version_id=&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&month=0&cweid=0&order=3&trc=505&sha=cad8183bd44fc4f183038a1ca8490122ee688f30 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

by pornel 7y ago

_bxg1 7y ago

I've been experimenting with Iron/Router: https://github.com/iron/router https://github.com/iron/router Do you know how it compares?

staticassertion 7y ago
I don't think Iron is even supported anymore, but for one thing, last I checked, Iron was based on OS threads primarily whereas Actix has a (I believe) pluggable runtime, which supports async.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Ah really? That's surprising, as Iron seemed to be the go-to for what it does. I guess that's just a symptom of a nascent ecosystem.
  - GrayShade 7y ago
    Iron has a rather baroque API and was pretty much unmaintained for a very long time.
    - EugeneOZ 7y ago
      and it still serve my servers pretty well, few years already.
- shepmaster 7y ago
  Iron had a long quiet period, but it does have updates recently (a commit 12 days ago, for example).
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Oh neat, I wasn't aware. Thank you.

littlestymaar 7y ago

> Actix-web in used in production at Cloudflare for the image resizing feature. Oh, that's really interesting. I actually used it for exactly the same purpose, but I was a bit disappointed by the image[1] crate for the image-resizing itself: it was several times slower than imagemagick (it was less the case on my decktop, when compiled with `target-cpu=native`, but on my low-end server many SIMD instructions weren't available and auto-vectorized code wasn't that efficient) and the image quality was also way poorer. Did you use that crate for the image processing ? Or imagemagick ? Or something you wrote internally ? [1]: https://github.com/image-rs/image https://github.com/image-rs/image

anderspitman 7y ago
I'm curious about this as well.
kbenson 7y ago
Did you try looking for Rust bindings to ImageMagick? If it's really that much faster, it might make sense to just call out to it. I found https://github.com/nlfiedler/magick-rust https://github.com/nlfiedler/magick-rust with e quick search, but I don't know how well it works.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  It was much faster (between 3 and 5 times) but performance wasn't a critical part on this project, the ease of use and deployment was higher on the list. Also, I'm not sure I would trust imagemagick enough anymore to put it on a web-facing server, since its security track record doesn't smell that good [1]. But I was still disappointed by the poor performance of the `image` library because Rust has shown in many areas that it has potential to write code which is as fast as C, and in this case it didn't deliver. [1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1749&product_id=&version_id=&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&month=0&cweid=0&order=3&trc=505&sha=cad8183bd44fc4f183038a1ca8490122ee688f30 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...