Mijikai - A high-performance Redis-backed URL shortener with API endpoints

Demo

Features

• High performance - mean response time for GET methods is 33 msec (see details in Performance section below)
• Anonymous - Only number of visits to shortened links are stored for analytics
• Simple codebase - Angular is used for the front-end and Flask for the server-side code

API Endpoints

Shorten a URL

GET /shorten

Params:

Name	Type	Description
url	string	Required. URL to shorten. e.g. www.google.com

Response:

{
  "id": "4xJ",
  "long_url": "http://www.google.com",
  "short_url": "http://mijikai.herokuapp.com/4xJ",
  "success": true,
  "visits": 0
}

See details of shortened URL

GET /detail

Params:

Name	Type	Description
id	string	Required. **id** of shortened. e.g. 4xJ

Response:

Success:

{
  "id": "4xJ",
  "long_url": "http://www.google.com",
  "short_url": "http://mijikai.herokuapp.com/4xJ",
  "success": true,
  "visits": "2"
}

Failure:

{
  "error": "Unknown short URL",
  "success": false
}

Performance

Apache Bench with 10 concurrent clients reports the following times for shortening the same URL 6000 times (only the first time is an actual shortening performed; the rest of the times, the cached result is returned directly from redis).

The mean response time is 24 msec.

Server Software:        gunicorn/17.5
Server Hostname:        mijikai.herokuapp.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /shorten?url=http://www.google.com
Document Length:        147 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   147.015 seconds
Complete requests:      6000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      1788000 bytes
HTML transferred:       882000 bytes
Requests per second:    40.81 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       245.025 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       24.502 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          11.88 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       51  109 180.5     80    3199
Processing:    67  135  69.0    115    1172
Waiting:       42  131  68.7    112    1164
Total:        124  244 200.1    205    3400

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    205
  66%    236
  75%    260
  80%    278
  90%    342
  95%    430
  98%    588
  99%    719
 100%   3400 (longest request)

A more meaningful test is performed using LoaderIO in which we randomize the URLs being shortened (see a sample randomized payload in payload.txt) so that different URLs are presented to the app over time.

Loader IO reports an average response time of 33 msec with 10 concurrent clients. The distribution of response time is shown in the graph below: