Re: Is sendfile all that sexy?

Jonathan Thackray (jthackray@zeus.com)
Mon, 15 Jan 2001 15:24:55 +0000


> Does anybody but apache actually use it?

Zeus uses it! (it was HP who added it to HP-UX first at our request :-)

> PS. I still _like_ sendfile(), even if the above sounds negative. It's
> basically a "cool feature" that has zero negative impact on the design
> of the system. It uses the same "do_generic_file_read()" that is used
> for normal "read()", and is also used by the loop device and by
> in-kernel fileserving. But it's not really "important".

It's a very useful system call and makes file serving much more
scalable, and I'm glad that most Un*xes now have support for it
(Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64). The next cool feature to add to
Linux is sendpath(), which does the open() before the sendfile()
all combined into one system call.

Ugh, I hear you all scream :-)

Jon.

-- 
Jonathan Thackray         Zeus House, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 OZT, UK
Software Engineer                   +44 1223 525000, fax +44 1223 525100
Zeus Technology                                     http://www.zeus.com/

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