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Network Computing and Applications, Third IEEE International Symposium on (NCA'04)
A Fast Polling I/O Implementation with Real-time Signals
Boston, Massachusetts
August 30-September 01
ISBN: 0-7695-2242-4
Eiji Kawai, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Youki Kadobayashi, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Suguru Yamaguchi, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
This study revisits the scalability issue of polling I/O, i.e., select()and poll(). Although polling I/O was an efficient and hence popular I/O multiplexing mechanism, it is believed inadequate today to handle tens of thousands of concurrent TCP connections because the scanning cost of such a large connection list is overwhelmingly high. However, the real problem of polling I/O is not in the semantics itself, but in various implementation factors such as memory allocations and copies to process a system call, pointer operations and function calls through VFS, and wait channel management to handle events. To mitigate these overheads and reinstate polling I/O as an efficient I/O multi-plexing mechanism, we have developed a fast polling I/O library based on POSIX real-time signals. This library implements the full functionality of polling I/O by managing the state transition of each connection notified with real-time signals. Traditional polling I/O has a weakness especially when it polls a small number of active connections together with a huge number of idle ones. Our polling I/O library is proved to achieve high performance in that situation.
Citation:
Eiji Kawai, Youki Kadobayashi, Suguru Yamaguchi, "A Fast Polling I/O Implementation with Real-time Signals," nca, pp.317-322, Network Computing and Applications, Third IEEE International Symposium on (NCA'04), 2004
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