Re: [Boost-users] boost asio synchronous vs asynchronous operations performance

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] boost asio synchronous vs asynchronous operations performance
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-03-22 13:34:30

On 21 Mar 2014 at 9:54, Donald Alan wrote:

> When the client is running against synchronous server it is able to receive
> around 700K msgs/sec but when it is running against asynchronous server the
> performance is dropped to around 100K-120K msgs/sec. I know that one should
> use asynchronous IO for scalability when we have more number of clients and
> in the above case as I'm using only a single client, the obvious advantage
> of asynchronous IO is not evident. But the question is, is asynchronous IO
> expected to effect the performance so badly for a single client case or am I
> missing some obvious best practices to follow with asynchronous IO? Is the
> significant drop in the performance is because of the thread switch between
> ioservice thread (which is main thread in the above case) and connection
> thread?

Linux isn't capable of asynchronous i/o [1], so of course directly 
calling synchronous kernel APIs will be faster than using threads to 
multiplex kernel APIs. I think most of your disparity though is that 
you are doing at least two (and probably more) syscalls per message 
for the async case as ASIO must do a poll/select per message. I'd 
very interested to see your results on an OS which does implement 
async i/o - Windows is the easiest.

Anyway, I really wouldn't worry about ASIO performance. ASIO can 
exceed 3m threaded dispatches per second on a quad core Intel. Even 
AFIO, which extends ASIO and uses lots of "slow" futures, breaks past 
1.5m dispatches/sec.

[1]: Linux can do non-blocking socket i/o, but non-blocking is *not* 
asynchronous i/o. Linux can do a limited amount of async file i/o 
using a special syscall not used by any of the libc implementations 
of POSIX routines. FreeBSD can do async i/o, but ASIO isn't wired up 
for it.

Niall

-- 
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