WebeID

Unique ID generator based on Snowflake, but for us wizards

A 64bit unique ID

Definition

5 bytes - time in milliseconds since custom epoch. (total of 34.84 years) 1 byte - node id (total of 256 nodes) 2 bytes - incrementing sequence number

Assumptions made for this ID

• Technology will quickly advance to the point where 128bit IDs (like GUID) will be acceptably performant in extremely large database tables.
  • This means that we don't need large time range and we likely won't ever make use of the "future use" bit that Snowflake and Sonyflake have.
• The developer using this is a hobbyist or small production
  • Very likely won't scale up ID creation to 1000's of distributed machines
  • Use of these IDs is unlikely to outlive the max time frame

Advantages

• Supports fast id creation, up to 65536 id's per millisecond.
  • I wanted this number to be really big, since my slightly overclocked 3.8GHZ i5-7600 on Pop-OS 19.10 (Ubuntu derivative) can create a new ID in about 500nanoseconds.
    • That's about 2000 IDs per millisecond. So plenty of room to grow as CPUs get faster without needing more nodes.
• Data sections are divisible on common 8bit byte boundaries,
  • Parsing sections does not require bit operations. Convert to big-endian byte array with ".tobebytes()" and then use the slice indexes 0-4, 5, 6-7
  • Since we're focusing on a high rate of id generation PER NODE, the first 6 bytes become highly repeated and therefore compressable.

Notes

• I could have chosen intervals of 10ms like Sony's Sonyflake, which would put the total timeframe up to 348.4 years
  • Higher sequences per 10ms means that IDs would be even more compressable.
  • However; My bet is that processors in the future, even in just a few years, will be able to blow past the max sequence range in 10ms (causing duplicates).