Re: [Boost-users] ASIO or Thread

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] ASIO or Thread
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-08 02:22:09

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Lloyd <lloyd_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>  We need to develop a server in a LAN environment, in which the number of
> connections at a time will be less, but the data traffic per connection will
> be huge (gigabytes). So for the best performance which library is better?
> ASIO or Thread?
>
> Is thre is any specif advice for attaining the maximum performace (data
> rate)? I am a newbie.
>
> Thanks,
>  Lloyd
>

Unless you are doing lots of non-disk related stuff with the data, there is
no point in using multiple threads.  What will the threads even do?  disk
i/o is issued as an asynchronous system call which returns immediately, so
having multiple threads all returning immediately and then waiting for work
doesn't serve much purpose.

If, on the other hand, you are doing computation on the data then you can
use multiple threads.  I use asio in exactly this way.  One thread doing all
the I/O from the disk, then a thread pool of
boost::thread::hardware_concurrency() threads encrypting and computing MD5
sums of data, then passing that to the next stage of the pipeline which is
back in the original main application thread which dumps it to a socket
asynchronously.  So all the i/o (disk / network) is on a single thread, and
all the computation is in a thread pool.