FlexPoll: adaptive event polling for network-intensive applications

摘要

In today’s data centers supporting Internet-scale computing and input/output (I/O) services, increasinglymore network-intensive applications are deployed on the network as a service. To this end, it is critical for the applications to quickly retrieve requests from the network and send their responses to the network. To facilitate this network function, operating system usually provides an event notification mechanism so that the applications (or the library) know if the network is ready to supply data for them to read or to receive data for them to write. As a widely used and representative notification mechanism, epoll in Linux provides a scalable and high-performance implementation by allowing applications to specifically indicate which connections and what events on them need to be watched.