Sunday, December 23, 2012

Node.js Asynchronous i/o under the hood


I had a conversation with a friend at lunch about how node does async i/o under the covers.

We were basically arguing over whether or not node was truly single threaded or whether or not some operations launched a background thread to handle the operation. Looks like the answer is yes in some cases another thread is launched. For instance:

libeio (by Marc Lehmann) is a fantastic idea: it relies on POSIX threads to provide an asynchronous version of the POSIX API: open, close, stat, unlink, fdatasync, mknod, etc. It would be nice if UNIX kernels provided this asynchronism natively, because the overhead of using a thread for a stat() call when the inode data is already cached in memory is significant.

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=34

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