operating system supports.
Asynchronous means that operations that can normally block your
program (e.g. reading from disk) will be done asynchronously: the
operation will still block, but you can do something else in the
meantime. This is extremely useful for programs that need to stay
interactive even when doing heavy I/O (GUI programs, high performance
network servers etc.), but can also be used to easily do operations in
parallel that are normally done sequentially, e.g. stat'ing many files,
which is much faster on a RAID volume or over NFS when you do a number
of stat operations concurrently.
While most of this works on all types of file descriptors (for example
sockets), using these functions on file descriptors that support
nonblocking operation (again, sockets, pipes etc.) is very inefficient
or might not work (aio_read fails on sockets/pipes/fifos). Use an
event loop for that (such as the Event module): IO::AIO will naturally
fit into such an event loop itself.
WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/IO-AIO/
Notes: For index unbreak.
PR: ports/106526
Submitted by: Gea-Suan Lin <gslin at gslin.org>
