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USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, General Track — Abstract
Pp. 241–254 of the Proceedings
Lazy Asynchronous I/O for Event-Driven Servers
Khaled Elmeleegy, Anupam Chanda, and Alan L. Cox, Rice University; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL, Lausanne
Abstract
We introduce Lazy Asynchronous I/O (LAIO), a new asynchronous
I/O interface that is well suited to event-driven programming. LAIO is general
in the sense that it applies to all blocking I/O operations. Furthermore,
it is lazy in the sense that it creates a continuation only when
an operation actually blocks, and it notifies the application only when a
blocked operation completes in its entirety. These features make programming
high-performance, event-driven servers using LAIO considerably easier than
with previous interfaces.
We describe a user-level implementation of LAIO, relying only on kernel
support for scheduler activations, a facility present in many Unix-like systems.
We compare the performance of web servers implemented using LAIO to the
performance obtained with previous interfaces. For workloads with an appreciable
amount of disk I/O, LAIO performs substantially better than the alternatives,
because it avoids blocking entirely. In one such case, the peak throughput
with LAIO is 24% higher than the next best alternative. For in-memory workloads
it performs comparably.
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