Re: OSDI paper - IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System

Oliver Xymoron (oxymoron@waste.org)
Tue, 2 Mar 1999 23:41:28 -0600 (CST)


On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, Jim Gettys wrote:

> It shows a new I/O approach that is very general and flexible, and avoids
> data copies with minimal overhead, even between processes. The authors
> use as an example Web service, and show very good performance gains.

Very interesting. We probably wouldn't see quite the gains the author saw
with his FreeBSD implementation. It's a good match for FreeBSD as it
already has a zero-copy scheme in a lot of areas and fits better with
their design philosophy. Linux largely avoids VM manipulations like those
suggested for instance by I/O-Lite's IPC scheme, because of their nasty
effect on CPU caches, SMP scaling, etc. So parts of it are going to be a
hard sell. And we've got sendfile(2) now, which is not nearly as pretty or
generic, but might still give similar performance at least for the common
web server case.

--
 "Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by W.A.S.T.E.." 

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