Disk IO


Traditional UNIX-style disk IO is synchronous
ie, read()/write() wait until the IO has completed before returning, regardless of whether you've set non-blocking
(But yes, under Windows..)
So, alternate mechanisms are needed
Threads - spawn threads to service a request queue to handle IO
External processes - much the same, but using IPC/SYSVSHM
At high throughputs, you will want to have an intelligent on-disk file/disk format/layout
.. reading/writing large blocks is all good
.. trying to work with the OS disk device caching is also all good