@natevanben

chief architect @turbopuffer, previously distributed systems @CockroachDB

New York, NY
Joined April 2013
Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
@morgallant you can prob do a lot better here with SIMD
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
turbopuffer crossed $100M run-rate in March. 19mo after $1M. Profitable & <$1M raised. Cursor・Anthropic・Notion・Cognition・Harvey・Bridgewater・Ramp・Linear・Legora・Superhuman・Atlassian・Granola We’d be nowhere without them. We work like hell to exceed their expectations.
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
SID-1 is an agentic search model by @SID_AI → 1.9x recall over RAG + rerank → 24x faster, 99% cheaper than GPT-5.1 trained using large-scale RL on turbopuffer at 1k+ QPS bursts over 10M+ document corpora across thousands of steps tpuf.link/sid-1
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We've been pushing search to uncomfortable scales @turbopuffer: 100B vector indexes To get there, we had to rethink how search algos map onto hardware. The key insight was balancing bandwidth demands across the memory hierarchy I wrote about the approach and the math behind it
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
tpuf ANN v3 can search 100 billion vectors with a p99 of 200ms simplicity scales [v3 in beta, unfiltered search, 1024D, k=10, 92% recall]
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Compare-and-swap has an infinite consensus number. It’s universal – powerful enough to solve any consensus problem. That’s why I’m excited about what we built here. It’s compare-and-swap all the way down.
S3’s conditional writes were the key ingredient that made our architecture possible now it's our time to pay it forward
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
we are looking for a p99 engineer to work on infra/autoscaling/k8s tooling for the 10s of clusters (soon 100s) we run across all 3 clouds. dm me
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
turbopuffer is generally available. petabytes in prod. turbopuffer.com/
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
modern NVMe drives are blazing fast, but software needs to be architected from the ground up to take full advantage of them we recently rolled out a new I/O scheduler that uses Direct I/O to maximize performance of our SSD caches, avoiding page cache cpu and locking overhead
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Week one hacking on search @turbopuffer and I’m shocked: the write:read ratio is way higher than OLTP. Ingesting and indexing a constant stream of massive batches is heavy on writes. Reads are less frequent—they just need to be fast.
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
last week team tpuf welcomed two more p99 database engineers @natevanben and @danhhz ❤️🐡💨
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Sign you’ve spent too much time recently with weak iso levels: when trying to recall why consensus requires two durable writes, the prepare phase of paxos starts to look suspiciously like an optimistic, quorum-replicated SELECT FOR UPDATE lock to avoid lost updates (break safety)
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This is even more apparent in CASPaxos (arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07000) from @rystsov.
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
Ever wanna just know if a line of code is being hit? Or how often? Or from where? In prod!? We've been hard at work making that just a click away with side-eye.io/!
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Nathan VanBenschoten retweeted
I couldn't be more proud of the many teams that contributed to making possible this incredible testament of @DoorDash's success migrating from Postgres to @CockroachDB. Incredible read that highlights so much database goodness and learnings! doordash.engineering/2023/02…
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Great thread. Geo latency necessitates a reimagining of infrastructure. Compromising on survivability/correctness of state isn't the answer. My team @CockroachDB spent 2 years addressing this head-on by letting apps express access locality in their schema cockroachlabs.com/blog/deplo…
Latency is increasingly important across variety of use cases. For example, in e-commerce, going beyond single digit millisecond latencies is believed to hurt revenue. But how is this need for speed driving infrastructure changes today? Here's one answer. 🧵 1/
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We actually just found out that our paper describing the work was accepted to the SIGMOD'22 industry track!
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The next step is end-to-end low-latency serverless apps spread across the globe. One combination I'm excited about is @vercel + @prisma + @cockroachdb
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