[Boost-users] asio stability and scalability

Subject: [Boost-users] asio stability and scalability
From: Eric Twietmeyer (zimbus26_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-10-19 09:36:37

Hello,

The project I am involved with required porting a Windows only networking 
application that was using the WSAAsynSelect mechanism to GNU/Linux, while 
remaining Windows compatible.  We chose Boost asio as the framework to use.

After spending time with asio and understanding it, the port was relatively 
straight forward.  It basically works, both on Windows and on GNU/Linux.

However, on both systems we are now running into stack corruptions.  We have 
spent quite a few weeks now trying to track this down, mostly on Windows, as 
we have access to very many tools on that platform.  We have verified that 
all underlying Win32 (and Winsock) function calls are valid (all parameters 
check), that our heap is not corrupt (all memory allocations and 
deallocations are clean), and we have eliminated all threading issues by 
restructuring the code to be runnable on a single io_service::run() thread 
(and Intel's Thread Checker found no issues either).  We have done many 
other verifications as well, everything comes out clean.

At this point we have to strongly consider the possibility that it is asio 
itself that is causing this error, though we are quite at a loss to explain 
how asio could result in this behavior.

So we are wondering, are there known large production systems out there that 
use asio?  Are there high volume web servers for instance written with asio? 
I came across this comment:

http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1700&Itemid=85

which, if true, would also imply that asio is perhaps not appropriate for 
high throughput applications, at least on GNU/Linux systems.

My basic question is: Do people have success stories using asio in 
production applications?  Have people used other frameworks, for instance 
ACE, and can comment on how they compare?  Have others ran into random 
crashes and given up on using asio?

Thanks for any feedback,

-Eric