2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Abstract
Pp. 129142 of the Proceedings
Flux: A Language for Programming High-Performance Servers
Brendan Burns, Kevin Grimaldi, Alexander Kostadinov, Emery D. Berger, and Mark D. Corner, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract
Programming high-performance server applications is challenging: it is
both complicated and error-prone to write the concurrent code required
to deliver high performance and scalability. Server performance
bottlenecks are difficult to identify and correct. Finally, it is
difficult to predict server performance prior to deployment.
This paper presents Flux, a language that dramatically simplifies the
construction of scalable high-performance server applications. Flux
lets programmers compose off-the-shelf, sequential C or C++ functions
into concurrent servers. Flux programs are type-checked and guaranteed
to be deadlock-free. We have built a number of servers in Flux,
including a web server with PHP support, an image-rendering server, a
BitTorrent peer, and a game server. These Flux servers match or exceed
the performance of their counterparts written entirely in C. By
tracking hot paths through a running server, Flux simplifies the
identification of performance bottlenecks. The Flux compiler also
automatically generates discrete event simulators that accurately
predict actual server performance under load and with different
hardware resources.
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