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Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
Network Computing and Applications, Third IEEE International Symposium on (NCA'04)
pp. 317-322
A Fast Polling I/O Implementation with Real-time Signals
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
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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/NCA.2004.1347793
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| Abstract |
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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.
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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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