sys_epoll - making poll fast [LWN.net]

sys_epoll - making poll fast

Posted Oct 31, 2002 4:02 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (subscriber, #305)
Parent article: sys_epoll - making poll fast

This sounds a lot like NT's IO Completion Ports, but without NT's automatic thread pool management. IO Completion Ports are nice because the thread pool balances the work items (IO callbacks) to threads pinned to each CPU. There is usually one one thread per CPU servicing IO callbacks. This avoids extra context switches overhead and avoids trashing the CPU cache with multiple threads. I'm sure thread pooling could be added with userland libraries on top of the sys_epoll system call.

(Log in to post comments)

sys_epoll - making poll fast

Posted Oct 31, 2002 8:08 UTC (Thu) by johnchx (subscriber, #4262) [Link]

I'd like to hear more about how this approach compares with asynchronous reads and writes from/to sockets. Doesn't the ability to do async i/o reduce the need for a scalable select()-style mechanism?