mod_qr open sourced

To celebrate the launch of the latest version lilqr.com I decided to open source the previous C-based version. In case you missed it, a couple of week ago I launched lilqr.com and submitted it to HackerNews. Within 40 minutes it hit the number one spot at and stayed there for several hours. The day after it started trending in /r/programming on reddit and was the top post for a couple of hours there as well until it was removed for some reason.

The C version is blazing but when it came to development of new features at a reasonable pace I realized I missed so many components that I took for granted in Python. Instead of spending the majority of my time on rewriting or reimplementing these components into the Apache module I decided to go with Python and accept the performance hit.

Some basic ab benchmarks showed a decrease from about ~4000 QRs/sec in the C-version to ~1000 QRs/sec in the Python-version. This is still about 1000 times more than the current request rate on the site. As I was able to rewrite pretty much everything to Python in a couple of hours including implementing custom tags and basic statistics in Redis I didn’t see any reason to stick with C or Apache.

So for now enjoy a Python based QR code to the github repo