AI BriefingRevisiting the Classics: The C10K Problem
Key point
We look at the definition of the C10K problem for handling 10,000 concurrent connections and the technical evolution that emerged to solve it.
Details
The C10K problem, raised by Dan Kegel in 1999, is the challenge of how a server can efficiently handle 10,000 concurrent users (Concurrent Users).
In the past, the common approach was to fork() a process or create a Thread for every request. However, this approach has the following limitations.
- Memory shortage: Each Thread is allocated its own separate stack memory, causing memory usage to surge sharply at large connection scales.
- Context Switching overhead: As the number of Threads increases, contention for CPU resources and context switching costs grow exponentially.
To solve these problems, Nonblocking I/O and Asynchronous I/O technologies emerged. Representative examples include epoll on Linux, kqueue on BSD, and IOCP on Windows, and these technologies have become the core operating principles of modern high-performance web servers such as nginx and Node.js.
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