TigerBeetle's static allocation and zero-copy I/O eliminate runtime memory overhead
TigerBeetle Core System Architecture: Deconstructing Performance Engineering
TigerBeetle, a financial ledger database written in Zig, achieves sub-millisecond tail latencies by eliminating dynamic memory allocation, bypassing the kernel cache with direct I/O and io_uring, and using a single-threaded execution loop backed by Viewstamped Replication. Its fixed-size 128-byte structs align with cache lines and sector sizes, enabling zero-copy persistence and predictable performance.
TigerBeetle’s core system architecture demonstrates that extreme performance is not achieved by adding complexity, but by systematically removing it.