NeverBlock, trivial non-blocking IO
summary
NeverBlock is a Ruby library that runs ordinary blocking-looking code concurrently by combining fibers with EventMachine, so code stays linear but yields at IO. It requires asynchronous drivers (it ships adapters for MySQL plus and PostgreSQL, hooks into ActiveRecord, Net::HTTP and Thin). Benchmarks show 100 synchronous queries fall from ~10s to ~1s, the author creates ~200,000 fibers vs ~8,000 threads, and one app cuts Thin processes from 16 to 4 for ~75% memory savings.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:16What is NeverBlock
- 2:40Synchronous execution example
- 4:02Thread-based concurrency
- 5:28Event-driven callbacks
- 10:22Simplifying concurrency
- 14:00Fibers core mechanism
- 18:38Two-way fiber comms
- 21:32Fibers vs threads efficiency
- 22:36Fiber-event machine combo
- 25:50NeverBlock for Rails
- 27:15Request processing visualized
- 29:45Production impact
- 31:07Features and future
- 32:29Q&A
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