[Python-ideas] An alternate approach to async IO

[Trent Nelson]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:49:51PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Trent Nelson <trent at snakebite.org> wrote:
> >     Right, so, I'm arguing that with my approach, because the background
> >     IO thread stuff is as optimal as it can be -- more IO events would
> >     be available per event loop iteration, and the latency between the
> >     event occurring versus when the event loop picks it up would be
> >     reduced.  The theory being that that will result in higher through-
> >     put and lower latency in practice.
> >
> >     Also, from a previous e-mail, this:
> >
> >         with aio.open('1GB-file-on-a-fast-SSD.raw', 'rb') as f:
> >             data = f.read()
> >
> >     Or even just:
> >
> >         with aio.open('/dev/zero', 'rb') as f:
> >             data = f.read(1024 * 1024 * 1024)
> >
> >     Would basically complete as fast as it physically possible to read
> >     the bytes off the device.  If you've got 16+ cores, then you'll have
> >     16 cores able to service IO interrupts in parallel.  So, the overall
> >     time to suck in a chunk of data will be vastly reduced.
> >
> >     There's no other way to get this sort of performance without taking
> >     my approach.
> 
> So there's something I fundamentally don't understand. Why do those
> calls, made synchronously in today's CPython, not already run as fast
> as you can get the bytes off the device? I assume it's just a transfer
> from kernel memory to user memory. So what is the advantage of using
> aio over
> 
>   with open(<file>, 'rb') as f:
>       data = f.read()

    Ah, right.  That's where the OVERLAPPED aspect comes into play.
    (Other than Windows and AIX, I don't think any other OS provides
     an overlapped IO facility?)

    The difference being, instead of having one thread writing to a 1GB
    buffer, 4KB at a time, you have 16 threads writing to an overlapped
    1GB buffer, 4KB at a time.

    (Assuming you have 16+ cores, and IO interrupts are coming in whilst
     existing threads are still servicing previous completions.)

        Trent.