Developer builds blobd object store achieving sub-millisecond reads and 15 GB/s uploads on single machine using io_uring, async Rust, and direct I/O to bypass S3's 30-200ms latency for small files and streaming content.

Building blobd: single-machine object store with sub-millisecond reads and 15 GB/s uploads

Published November 3, 202534 min read For a past content platform, I used S3 for serving user content videos and documents, where there were lots of small range requests for streaming and seeking. Despite serving from same-region datacenters 2 ms from the user, S3 would take 30-200 ms to respond to each request. Even slight delays when jumping around quickly felt grating, and in UX every millisecond counts. S3 also felt suboptimal for small objects, like thumbnails. They have the same high TTFB ...