Ruhvro

A library for deserializing schemaless avro encoded bytes into Apache Arrow record batches. This library was created as an experiment to gauge potential improvements in kafka messages deserialization speed - particularly from the python ecosystem.

The main speed-ups in this code are from releasing python's gil during deserialization and the use of multiple cores. The speed-ups are much more noticeable on larger datasets or more complex avro schemas.

Still experimental

This library is still experimental and has not been tested in production. Please use with caution.

Benchmarks - comparing to fastavro

On a 2022 m2 macbook air with 8gb memory and 8 cores processing 10000 records using timeit

Running pyruhvro serialize
20 loops, best of 5: 13.8 msec per loop
running fastavro serialize
5 loops, best of 5: 71.7 msec per loop
running pyruhvro deserialize
50 loops, best of 5: 6.59 msec per loop
running fastavro deserialize
5 loops, best of 5: 55.3 msec per loop

Run benchmarks locally

pip install pyruhvro 
pip install fastavro
pip install pyarrow

cd scripts
bash benchmark.sh

Usage

see scripts/generate_avro.py for a working example

from typing import List
from pyarrow import  RecordBatch
from pyruhvro import deserialize_array_threaded, serialize_record_batch

schema = """
    {
      "type": "record",
      "name": "userdata",
      "namespace": "com.example",
      "fields": [
        {
          "name": "userid",
          "type": "string"
        },
        {
          "name": "age",
          "type": "int"
        },
        ... more fields...
    }
    """
    
# serialized values from kafka messages
serialized_messages: list[bytes] = [serialized_message1, serialized_message2, ...]

# num_chunks is the number of chunks to break the data down into. These chunks can be picked up by other threads/cores on your machine
num_chunks = 8
record_batches: List[RecordBatch] = deserialize_array_threaded(serialized_messages, schema, num_chunks)

# serialize the record batches back to avro
serialized_records =  [serialize_record_batch(r, schema, 8) for r in record_batches]

Building from source:

requires rust tools to be installed

• create python virtual environment
• pip install maturin
• maturin build --release
• the previous command should yield a path to the compiled wheel file, something like this /users/currentuser/rust/pyruhvro/target/wheels/pyruhvro-0.1.0-cp312-cp312-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl
• pip install /users/currentuser/rust/pyruhvro/target/wheels/pyruhvro-0.1.0-cp312-cp312-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl