Eric's Blog

Network I/O Model

October 2, 2014
Author：Eric
Source：http://blog.wjin.org/posts/network-io-model.html
Declaration: this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Creative Commons License

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Synchronous I/O would block the calling process until the I/O operation is done. The calling process will finish I/O operation itself within process context.

Asynchronous I/O would not block the calling process. Calling process just sends request, and then continue to work. The opearting system will do the I/O operation, after it has done, it will notify the calling process.

I/O Model

There are two stages in I/O operation and four I/O models in general.

Stage

  1. Wait for data to be ready

  2. Copy data from kernel space to user space

Model

Blocking

Block on the first stage like recvfrom system call.

Non-blocking

Poll on the first stage.

I/O Multi-plexing

Block on select/poll/epoll system calls.

Above three models belong to synchronous I/O.

Asynchronous

Kernel does the IO and then notifies applications. For example, posix aio_read and aio_write APIs. However, they are not widely used by applications.

Above cencepts are from book Unix Networking Programming.

Regard to implementation in linux, there are two aio ways, glibc aio (posix standard implementaion) and libaio, but they are specific to file io, not socket. Glibc aio is simulated by multi-threads and its performance is not good. However, libaio is a library that wrappers linux aio system calls, so its performance is better than glibc aio. Normally, we use libaio to develop applications, its major APIs are listed here: