the c10k problem

The C10K problem

I/O frameworks

Prepackaged libraries are available that abstract some of the techniques presented below, insulating your code from the operating system and making it more portable.

• ACE
  • Reactor is an OO way of doing nonblocking I/O
  • Proactor is an OO way of doing asynchronous I/O

• ASIO

• libevent

I/O Strategies

Designers of networking software have many options. The following five combinations seem to be popular:

• Serve many clients with each thread, and use nonblocking I/O and level-triggered readiness notification
  • The traditional select()
  • The traditional poll()
  • /dev/poll
  • kqueue()
• Serve many clients with each thread, and use nonblocking I/O and readiness change notification
  • kqueue()
  • epoll
  • Realtime Signals
  • Signal-per-fd

• Serve many clients with each server thread, and use asynchronous I/O

• serve one client with each server thread, and use blocking I/O

• Build the server code into the kernel