ViewVC Help
View File | Revision Log | Show Annotations | Download File
/cvs/libev/README
Revision: 1.14
Committed: Thu Nov 8 16:58:00 2007 UTC (17 years, 1 month ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-0_7, rel-0_6
Changes since 1.13: +3 -6 lines
Log Message:
*** empty log message ***

File Contents

# Content
1 libev is a high-performance event loop/event model with lots of features.
2
3 It is modelled (very losely) after libevent
4 (http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent/) and the Event perl module, but aims
5 to be faster and more correct, and also more featureful.
6
7 DIFFERENCES AND COMPARISON TO LIBEVENT:
8
9 (comparisons relative to libevent-1.3e and libev-0.00, see also the benchmark
10 at http://libev.schmorp.de/bench.html).
11
12 - multiple watchers can wait for the same event without deregistering others,
13 both for file descriptors as well as signals.
14 (registering two read events on fd 10 and unregistering one will not
15 break the other).
16
17 - fork() is supported and can be handled
18 (there is no way to recover from a fork when libevent is active).
19
20 - timers are handled as a priority queue (important operations are O(1))
21 (libevent uses a much less efficient but more complex red-black tree).
22
23 - supports absolute (wallclock-based) timers in addition to relative ones,
24 i.e. can schedule timers to occur after n seconds, or at a specific time.
25
26 - timers can be repeating (both absolute and relative ones).
27
28 - detects time jumps and adjusts timers
29 (works for both forward and backward time jumps and also for absolute timers).
30
31 - race-free signal processing
32 (libevent may delay processing signals till after the next event).
33
34 - less calls to epoll_ctl
35 (stopping and starting an io watcher between two loop iterations will now
36 result in spuriois epoll_ctl calls).
37
38 - usually less calls to gettimeofday and clock_gettime
39 (libevent calls it on every timer event change, libev twice per iteration).
40
41 - watchers use less memory
42 (libevent on amd64: 152 bytes, libev: <= 56 bytes).
43
44 - library uses less memory
45 (libevent allocates large data structures wether used or not, libev
46 scales all its data structures dynamically).
47
48 - no hardcoded arbitrary limits
49 (libevent contains an off-by-one bug and sometimes hardcodes a limit of
50 32000 fds).
51
52 - libev separates timer, signal and io watchers from each other
53 (libevent combines them, but with libev you can combine them yourself
54 by reusing the same callback and still save memory).
55
56 - simpler design, backends are potentially much simpler
57 (in libevent, backends have to deal with watchers, thus the problems)
58 (epoll backend in libevent: 366 lines, libev: 90 lines, and more features).
59
60 - libev handles EBADF gracefully by removing the offending fds.
61
62 - doesn't rely on nonportable BSD header files.
63
64 - a event.h compatibility header exists, and can be used to run a wide
65 range of libevent programs unchanged (such as evdns.c).
66
67 - win32 compatibility for the core parts.
68
69 - the event core library (ev and event layer) compiles and works both as
70 C and C++.
71
72 whats missing?
73
74 - no event-like priority support at the moment (the ev priorities
75 are not yet finished and work differently, but you cna use idle watchers
76 to get a similar effect).
77
78