Is there any modern review of solutions to the 100

Question

(Commonly called the C10K problem)

Is there a more contemporary review of solutions to the c10k problem (Last updated: 2 Sept 2006), specifically focused on Linux (epoll, signalfd, eventfd, timerfd..) and libraries like libev or libevent?

Something that discusses all the solved and still unsolved issues on a modern Linux server?

Answer 1

The C10K problem generally assumes you're trying to optimize a single server, but as your referenced article points out "hardware is no longer the bottleneck". Therefore, the first step to take is to make sure it isn't easiest and cheapest to just throw more hardware in the mix.

If we've got a $500 box serving X clients per second, it's a lot more efficient to just buy another $500 box to double our throughput instead of letting an employee gobble up who knows how many hours and dollars trying to figure out how squeeze more out of the original box. Of course, that's assuming our app is multi-server friendly, that we know how to load balance, etc, etc...

Answer 2

libev runs some benchmarks against themselves and libevent...

Answer 3

Coincidentally, just a few days ago, Programming Reddit or maybe Hacker News mentioned this piece:

Thousands of Threads and Blocking IO

In the early days of Java, my C programming friends laughed at me for doing socket IO with blocking threads; at the time, there was no alternative. These days, with plentiful memory and processors it appears to be a viable strategy.

The article is dated 2008, so it pulls your horizon up by a couple of years.

Answer 4

I'd recommend Reading Zed Shaw's poll, epoll, science, and superpoll[1]. Why epoll isn't always the answer, and why sometimes it's even better to go with poll, and how to bring the best of both worlds.

[1] http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1280829388.html

Answer 5

To answer OP's question, you could say that today the equivalent document is not about optimizing a single server for load, but optimizing your entire online service for load. From that perspective, the number of combinations is so large that what you are looking for is not a document, it is a live website that collects such architectures and frameworks. Such a website exists and its called www.highscalability.com

Side Note 1:

I'd argue against the belief that throwing more hardware at it is a long term solution:

• Perhaps the cost of an engineer that "gets" performance is high compared to the cost of a single server. What happens when you scale out? Lets say you have 100 servers. A 10 percent improvement in server capacity can save you 10 servers a month.

• Even if you have just two machines, you still need to handle performance spikes. The difference between a service that degrades gracefully under load and one that breaks down is that someone spent time optimizing for the load scenario.

Side note 2:

The subject of this post is slightly misleading. The CK10 document does not try to solve the problem of 10k clients per second. (The number of clients per second is irrelevant unless you also define a workload along with sustained throughput under bounded latency. I think Dan Kegel was aware of this when he wrote that doc.). Look at it instead as a compendium of approaches to build concurrent servers, and micro-benchmarks for the same. Perhaps what has changed between then and now is that you could assume at one point of time that the service was for a website that served static pages. Today the service might be a noSQL datastore, a cache, a proxy or one of hundreds of network infrastructure software pieces.

Answer 6

You can also take a look at this series of articles:

http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-3

He shows a fair amount of performance data and the OS configuration work he had to do in order to support 10K and then 1M connections.

It seems like a system with 30GB of RAM could handle 1 million connected clients on a sort of social network type of simulation, using a libevent frontend to an Erlang based app server.