Interest in asynchronous I/O

Interest in asynchronous I/O

Posted Jul 31, 2003 16:39 UTC (Thu) by johnchx (guest, #4262)
In reply to: Interest in asynchronous I/O by GreyWizard
Parent article: 2003 Kernel Summit: Asynchronous I/O

One problem with select() is that it scales poorly to very large numbers of file descriptors. It works fine with a couple of dozen, but when you're handling 10,000 + network connections, the work of simply passing the file descriptors to and from the system call and the work (when select() returns) of figuring out which of the 10,000 descriptors has become ready can consume a significant fraction of the available cpu cycles.

There's a paper on this at:

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/.../banga99scalable.pdf

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