Comparing I/O Performance: Blocking I/O vs io_uring and kqueue with Programmer-Friendly Abstractions
By
enz
The kind of bagel that ruins lesser bagels for you.
Summary
This technical article explores I/O performance optimization by comparing different approaches to file and network operations. It starts with traditional blocking I/O, then examines modern asynchronous I/O mechanisms like io_uring (Linux) and kqueue (BSD/macOS), and ultimately presents a programmer-friendly abstraction layer that creates an event loop similar to familiar software patterns. The content is deeply technical, focusing on system programming, performance considerations, and cross-platform I/O abstractions for developers working with low-level file and network operations.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWhen you want to read from a file you might open() and then call read() as many times as necessary to fill a buffer of bytes from the file.
This is a twist on King's talk at Software You Can Love Milan '22.
Consider this tale of I/O and performance. We'll start with blocking I/O, explore io_uring and kqueue, and take home an event loop very similar to some software you may find familiar.
It's similar for a TCP client with sockets, but instead of open() you first call socket() and then connect()
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