Improving Reactivity to I/O Events in Multithreaded Environments Using a Uniform, Scheduler-Centric API

Abstract. Reactivity to I/O events is a crucial factor for the perfor-mance of modern multithreaded distributed systems. In our scheduler-centric approach, an application detects I/O events by requesting a ser-vice from a detection server, through a simple, uniform API. We show that a good choice for this detection server is the thread scheduler. This approach simplifies application programming, significantly improves per-formance, and provides a much tighter control on reactivity.