From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2004-11-27T21:27:54+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Multiplexer - linear non-blocking I/O


"Gyoung-Yoon Noh" <nohmad@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:ff903fda04112610215fe2dc03@mail.gmail.com...
> Until one thread terminates a system call like IO-related task, other
> threads will be blocked. Kernel does not know ruby's (userland)
> threads, so if your application needs concurrency in massive IO tasks,
> maybe you should implement a kind of thread scheduler by yourself. OK,
> Kernel#fork will be an another choice.
>
> If 'thread' is only sufficient for all, why did Sun adopt NIO in Java2 
> 1.4?

Because threads have a certain overhead and Sun wanted to provide a means to 
write high performance (i.e. highly optimized) servers.  Apart from that I 
think they wanted to make the IO architecture more flexible and modular.

That said, a solution with threads and blocking IO is still more elegant 
IMHO.  It's just that for some circumstances this is not the right solution.

Kind regards

    robert