Shadix Paper Artifact

This repository contains the source code, benchmark harnesses, benchmark results, and figures for the Shadix evaluation.

Repository Layout

• shadix/: Rust implementation and benchmark binaries for Shadix.
• valkey/: C++/libvalkey benchmark used as the Valkey comparison baseline.
• nats/: C++/nats.c benchmark used as the NATS comparison baseline (core and JetStream transports).
• pulsar/: C++/pulsar-client-cpp benchmark used as the Apache Pulsar comparison baseline (persistent and non-persistent transports).
• plotting/: Python scripts, generated figures, and commands for reproducing the latency and throughput comparison plots.
• flake.nix, flake.lock: Nix dev shells — the default shell provides the plotting environment, #benchmarks the C++ harness toolchain.

All benchmark result CSVs used by the plotting scripts are included under shadix/results/, valkey/results/, nats/results/, and pulsar/results/. The CSVs are stored with Git LFS (git lfs pull fetches them; ~4.0 GB).

Measurement Environment

Please refer to the paper for a description of the respective measurement environment we used to obtain the included results.

Building

Each harness README documents its build: cargo build --release for shadix/, and cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build -j for valkey/, nats/, and pulsar/. The C client libraries (libvalkey, nats.c, pulsar-client-cpp) are fetched at pinned tags via CMake FetchContent.

Benchmark Harnesses

Each benchmark directory has a top-level Makefile for orchestrated multi-host runs and a just/ directory with the recipes executed on the remote machines. Run make help in any benchmark directory for the sweep helpers and required variables:

make -C shadix help
make -C valkey help
make -C nats help
make -C pulsar help

Before running a benchmark, copy the relevant benchmark directory to every remote machine that executes its binaries and build it there — each harness README has a "Copy to Remote Machines" section with the exact rsync and build commands.

The makefiles provide sweep helpers for latency and throughput over item sizes. They write local CSVs to the harness's results/ directory. Host names, broker locations, CXL device paths, and remote result directories are set as variables at the top of each makefile (the committed host defaults are placeholders) and can be overridden on the command line.

Plotting

The root flake.nix provides the Python environment used by the plotting scripts:

nix develop
cd plotting
./make-figures.sh

This regenerates the paper's two figures (plotting/plots/latency_comparison_sync_async and plotting/plots/throughput_comparison_sync_async) from the included CSVs.

License

Everything in this repository — code, benchmark data, and figures — is released under the MIT license (see LICENSE). The third-party client libraries (nats.c, libvalkey, pulsar-client-cpp) are not part of this repository; they are fetched at build time from their upstream repositories at pinned tags and remain under their own licenses.