USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, Freenix Session - June 2000
Scalable Network I/O in Linux
Niels Provos, University of Michigan; Chuck Lever, Sun-Netscape
Alliance
Abstract
Recent highly publicized benchmarks have suggested that Linux systems do
not scale as well as other systems, such as Windows NT, when used as
network servers. Windows NT contains features such as I/O completion
ports that help boost network server performance and scalability. In
this paper we focus on improving the Linux implementation of poll() to
reduce the expense of managing large numbers of network connections. We
also explore the newer POSIX RT signal API that will help network
servers scale into the next decade. A comparison between the two
interfaces shows that a server using our /dev/poll interface scales
better than a server using RT signals.
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