A Scalable Locality-Aware Event Dispatching Mechanism
for Network Servers

Hao-Ran Liu and Tien-Fu Chen
Department of Computer Science
National Chung Cheng University
Chiayi, Taiwan 621, ROC

Abstract:

Network servers often need to process a large amount of network events asynchronously. However, system calls, select() or poll(), scale poorly when the number of open connections are increased. In this paper, we propose a user-mode solution that takes advantage of temporal locality among events while polling. We show that a memory-based web server with our approach can have about 20%-30% performance improvement.