My previous post promised a follow up to explain how network IO events are handled by HawtDispatch.  Before I get into the details, I urge you to read Mark McGranaghan’s post on Threaded vs Evented Servers.  He does an excellent job describing how event driven servers scale in comparison to threaded servers.   This post will try to highlight how HawtDispatch provides an excellent framework for the implementation of event based servers.

I just spotted an excellent article on how reducing the number of cores used by a multi-threaded actually increased it’s performance.  This seems counter intuitive at first, but it is a sad reality.  It is very easy to create contention across threads in a multi-threaded app which in turn lowers performance.