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Understanding sharding

Sharding

In seyfert the sharding approach is to give the full benefit of scaling while keeping the same structure in your project.

Why sharding?

JavaScript runtimes are single-threaded, which means that without sharding, all processing would happen in a single thread. This creates a processing limit where all the load is evaluated together. Seyfert handles sharding internally in the Client instance to help distribute this load across multiple processes or threads (although it is still an imperfect technique).

Managing shards

The base of the Worker is to allow to execute code in parallel in different parts of the CPU, either in threads or different processes. In terms of discord, this means the ability to connect several shards by spreading the load on each Worker, for seyfert this is just changing the mode property in the WorkerManager to decide the execution mode between threads to spawn clients on processor threads or cluster to spawn clients on different processes of the runtime.

import { WorkerManager } from 'seyfert';


const manager = new WorkerManager({
  mode: "threads",
  // ./src/client.ts for bun and deno (?
  path: "./dist/client.js",
  // you can override a lot of options, like number of workers, shards per worker...
});


manager.start();

Too simple? Seyfert takes care of all the logic so your project shouldn’t change much just by switching to a WorkerSharding.

Cache

Unlike traditional Discord libraries, Seyfert offers unified cache management across all shards. The cache can be centralized in the main process (the WorkerManager executor), ensuring consistent data access throughout your application.

To implement centralized caching, use the WorkerAdapter:

import { WorkerClient, WorkerAdapter } from 'seyfert';


const client = new WorkerClient();


client.setServices({
  cache: {
    adapter: new WorkerAdapter(client.workerData)
  }
});


await client.start();

Talking to other workers

If for some reason (I did not find any for the example), you want a specific worker to execute an action that another one received, you can simply ask it.

// I wish typescript allowed to represent parameters like python
client.tellWorker(
  workerId = 1,
  (worker, vars) => console.log(`Hii worker #${worker.workerId} from ${vars.workerId}`),
  vars = { workerId: client.workerId }
);