Messages in this thread |  | | | From | Jakub Jelinek <> | | Subject | Re: Thread implementations... | | Date | Thu, 25 Jun 1998 10:02:56 +0200 (MET DST) |
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> I'm a little curious as to which circumstances you are thinking of. > As far as I can see, it's a syscall for a single application (a > web server serving static objects) which is basically little more > than a benchmark. If you really have such a hugely loaded web server > you are likely to be doing lots of database lookups, cookie-controlled > variable content, shtml, other cgi trickery, etc. And if you really > just want to serve static objects as fast as possible, a round-robin > DNS with multiple servers gets you more robustness and a solution that > scales above Ethernet speeds. > > Would we just be doing this to look good agains NT in webstones?
As has been mentioned previously, if we add a fairly generic syscall ssize_t copy(int fromfd, int tofd, size_t len) then this will be useful to a lot of applications, not only Web servers, but even file managers, cat, etc. And web servers really spend horrible long time in copying data from files to the wire. Such a system call could open a wide range of slick tricks, like the SCSI to SCSI copy with a SCSI command without ever reaching memory, or by implementing COW buffers, one could do zero-copy file copying: during copy, just create new buffer-heads and point them to the same b_data and mark them as COW, thus save memory and the numerous copying. I think some kind of COW for buffer cache will be needed anyways for journaling, so this would be just another use...
Cheers, Jakub ___________________________________________________________________ Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University ___________________________________________________________________ Ultralinux - first 64bit OS to take full power of the UltraSparc Linux version 2.1.106 on a sparc64 machine (498.80 BogoMips). ___________________________________________________________________ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
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