On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 01:52:02PM -0500, Akins, Brian wrote:

I've tested, and it met my expectations on Linux 2.6 on Itanium, but I can't guarantee that the experiments were free from my own bias I guess.

I think so, in some environments anyway. If you have a server tuned for high throughput accross large bandwidth-delay product links then you have the general problem of equal-priority threads sitting around with quite a lot of large impending writes. Having them all in the polling loop is inefficient, and async is going to reduce the latency a little, though granted these days we may be talking about nanoseconds. And I guess responsivity and high BDP don't go together anyway, due to the speed of light.

I think if it interests people and they want to work on it, cool stuff, but don't neccessarily expect any actual pay-off in terms of performance. One of the great things about an open source project is that sometimes what gets worked on isn't driven by considerations other than what people feel like working on.

I'd be less worried about the effect on modules, many module authors already can't be bothered to make their modules thread-safe, but prefork still exists (and scales quite well, on many platforms).