The socket C10K problem

The first API used watching a set of non blocking sockets in the Berkeley sockets API was the select call. It has the problem performance degrades as you increase the number of sockets in the array it watchs significantly.

This was called the socket C10k problem. I discuss this with Vismay, with a brief guest appearance by Prannay:

Open

It turned out that it is possible to solve this problem using the following different APIs on each of the major operating systems:

• epoll on linux

• kqueue on FreeBSD - which is what OS X is based on.

• Over laping completion ports on Windows. (IOCP)