[smegel]

I think this would have been much better titled "Boosting NGINX Performance 9x with Asynchronous wrappers around blocking system calls".

Most people when hearing about "thread pools" in the context of a web-server think about using multiple threads for handling separate requests, which is NOT what this is about. It is using threads to enable some blocking syscalls (read and sendfile) to run asynchronously from the main event loop.

There's already a library for that! http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libeio.html

[misframer]

Similarly, there's libuv [0], which is used for Node.js and others.

[0] https://github.com/libuv/libuv

[rgbrenner]

libuv is for C projects that miss the joy of javascript callback hell.

[anacrolix]

Or don't want to have 10000 threads. I have a Go server that regularly bumps 140k goroutines. Try that shit with native threads.

[rgbrenner]

libuv isn't unique.. It's equivalent to libev + libeio.. in fact, that's what nodejs used before writing libuv. Whether or not it's faster than those is really case-by-case.. but what you'll definitely get with libuv is callbacks everywhere.

[jimjag]

As well as an Apache httpd MPM: Event