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Revision: 1.4
Committed: Wed Oct 31 00:24:16 2007 UTC (17 years, 1 month ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
Changes since 1.3: +6 -3 lines
Log Message:
signal support

File Contents

# User Rev Content
1 root 1.1 libev is modelled after libevent (http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent/), but aims
2     to be faster and more correct, and also more featureful. Examples:
3    
4 root 1.4 - multiple watchers can wait for the same event without deregistering others,
5     both for file descriptors as well as signals.
6 root 1.2 (registering two read events on fd 10 and unregistering one will not
7     break the other)
8    
9     - fork() is supported and can be handled
10     (there is no way to recover from a fork when libevent is active)
11    
12     - timers are handled as a priority queue
13     (libevent uses a less efficient red-black tree)
14    
15     - supports absolute (wallclock-based) timers in addition to relative ones,
16     i.e. can schedule timers to occur after n seconds, or at a specific time.
17    
18     - timers can be repeating (both absolute and relative ones)
19    
20     - detects time jumps and adjusts timers
21     (works for both forward and backward time jumps and also for absolute timers)
22    
23     - can correctly remove timers while executing callbacks
24     (libevent doesn't handle this reliably and can crash)
25    
26 root 1.3 - race-free signal processing
27     (libevent may delay processing signals till after the next event)
28    
29 root 1.2 - less calls to epoll_ctl
30     (stopping and starting an io watcher between two loop iterations will now
31     result in spuriois epoll_ctl calls)
32    
33     - usually less calls to gettimeofday and clock_gettime
34     (libevent calls it on every timer event change, libev twice per iteration)
35    
36     - watchers use less memory
37     (libevent on amd64: 152 bytes, libev: <= 56 bytes)
38    
39     - library uses less memory
40     (libevent allocates large data structures wether used or not, libev
41     scales all its data structures dynamically)
42    
43     - no hardcoded arbitrary limits
44     (libevent contains an off-by-one bug and sometimes hardcodes a limit of
45     32000 fds)
46    
47     - libev separates timer, signal and io watchers from each other
48     (libevent combines them, but with libev you can combine them yourself
49     by reusing the same callback and still save memory)
50    
51     - simpler design, backends are potentially much simpler
52     (in libevent, backends have to deal with watchers, thus the problems)
53     (epoll backend in libevent: 366 lines, libev: 89 lines, and more features)
54    
55     whats missing?
56    
57     - evdns, evhttp, bufferevent are missing, libev is only an even library at
58     the moment.
59    
60 root 1.4 - no priority support at the moment
61 root 1.2
62 root 1.4 - kqueue, poll (libev currently implements epoll and select)
63    
64     - windows support (whats windows?)
65 root 1.1