What's the difference between event-driven and

问题:

Event-driven and asynchronous are often used as synonyms. Are there any differences between the two?

Also, what is the difference between epoll and aio? How do they fit together?

Lastly, I've read many times that AIO in Linux is horribly broken. How exactly is it broken?

Thanks.

回答1:

Events is one of paradigms to achieve asynchronous execution. But not all asynchronous systems use events. That is about semantic meaning of these two - one is super-entity of another.

epoll and aio use different metaphors:

epoll is a blocking operation (epoll_wait()) - you block the thread until some event happens and then you dispatch the event to different procedures/functions/branches in your code.

In AIO you pass address of you callback function (completion routine) to the system and the system calls your function when something happens.

Problem with AIO is that your callback function code runs from system thread and so on top of system stack. A few problems with that as you can imagine.

回答2:

They are completely different things.

The events-driven paradigm means that an object called an "event" is sent to the program whenever something happens, without that "something" having to be polled in regular intervals to discover whether it has happened. That "event" may be trapped by the program to perform some actions (i.e. a "handler") -- either synchronous or asynchronous.

Therefore, handling of events can either be synchronous or asynchronous. JavaScript, for example, uses a synchronous eventing system.

Asynchronous means that actions can happen independent of the current "main" execution stream. Mind you, it does NOT mean "parallel", or "different thread". An "asynchronous" action may actually run on the main thread, blocking the "main" execution stream in the meantime. So don't confuse "asynchronous" with "multi-threading".

You may say that, technically speaking, an asynchronous operation automatically assumes eventing -- at least "completed", "faulted" or "aborted/cancelled" events (one or more of these) are sent to the instigator of the operation (or the underlying O/S itself) to signal that the operation has ceased. Thus, async is always event-driven, but not the other way round.

回答3:

Event driven is a single thread where events are registered for a certain scenario. When that scenario is faced, the events are fired. However even at that time each of the events are fired in a sequential manner. There is nothing Asynchronous about it. Node.js (webserver) uses events to deal with multiple requests.

Asynchronous is basically multitasking. It can spawn off multiple threads or processes to execute a certain function. It's totally different from event driven in the sense that each thread is independent and hardly interact with the main thread in an easy responsive manner. Apache (webserver) uses multiple threads to deal with incoming requests.