Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | Subject | Re: Is sendfile all that sexy? | Date | 14 Jan 2001 12:22:31 -0800 |
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In article <Pine.GSO.4.30.0101141237020.12354-100000@shell.cyberus.ca>, jamal <hadi@cyberus.ca> wrote: > >Before getting excited i had the courage to give plain 2.4.0-pre3 a whirl >and somethings bothered me.
Note that "sendfile(fd, file, len)" is never going to be faster than "write(fd, userdata, len)".
That's not the point of sendfile(). The point of sendfile() is to be faster than the _combination_ of:
addr = mmap(file, ...len...); write(fd, addr, len);
or
read(file, userdata, len); write(fd, userdata, len);
and in your case you're not comparing sendfile() against this combination. You're just comparing sendfile() against a simple "write()".
And no, I don't actually hink that sendfile() is all that hot. It was _very_ easy to implement, and can be considered a 5-minute hack to give a feature that fit very well in the MM architecture, and that the Apache folks had already been using on other architectures.
The only obvious use for it is file serving, and as high-performance file serving tends to end up as a kernel module in the end anyway (the only hold-out is samba, and that's been discussed too), "sendfile()" really is more a proof of concept than anything else.
Does anybody but apache actually use it?
Linus
PS. I still _like_ sendfile(), even if the above sounds negative. It's basically a "cool feature" that has zero negative impact on the design of the system. It uses the same "do_generic_file_read()" that is used for normal "read()", and is also used by the loop device and by in-kernel fileserving. But it's not really "important".
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