kgio - kinder, gentler I/O for Ruby

This is a legacy project, do not use it for new projects. Ruby 2.3 and later should make this obsolete. kgio provides non-blocking I/O methods for Ruby without raising exceptions on EAGAIN and EINPROGRESS.

Features

  • Can avoid expensive exceptions on common EAGAIN/EINPROGRESS errors, returning :wait_readable or :wait_writable instead. These exceptions got more expensive to hit under Ruby 1.9.2 (but were fixed in Ruby 1.9.3 and later to 1.9.1 performance levels, which were still bad)

  • Returns the unwritten portion of the string on partial writes, making it ideal for buffering unwritten data.

  • May call any method defined to be “kgio_wait_writable” or “kgio_wait_readable” methods to allow socket/pipe objects to make custom callbacks (such as adding the file descriptor to a poll set and yielding the current Fiber).

  • Uses accept4 on newer GNU/Linux systems to avoid unnecessary fcntl() calls

  • Uses MSG_DONTWAIT on GNU/Linux to further avoid unnecessary fcntl() calls

  • Compatible with existing Ruby IO objects and Ruby threading.

Install

The library consists of a C extension so you’ll need a Unix-like system with a C compiler and Ruby development libraries/headers. You may install it via RubyGems.org:

gem install kgio

You can get the latest source via git from the following locations (these versions may not be stable):

git://yhbt.net/kgio.git
git://repo.or.cz/kgio.git (mirror)

You may browse the code from the web and download the latest snapshot tarballs here:

See the HACKING guide on how to contribute and build prerelease gems from git.

Contact

All feedback (bug reports, user/development dicussion, patches, pull requests) go to the mailing list/newsgroup. See the ISSUES document for information on the kgio mailing list

For the latest on kgio releases, you may check our NEWS page (and subscribe to our Atom feed).