Asynchronous I/O is a very compelling alternative to the traditional threading approach, when your app is more I/O intensive than CPU intensive. It's also very

Asynchronous I/O is a very compelling alternative to the traditional threading approach, when your app is more I/O intensive than CPU intensive. It's also very scalable since you don't have to fill your memory with separate stacks for each thread and other overhead. I recently wrote some server software around the Linux epoll() system call and found it simple and effective to use. It's rewarding to eliminate all locking and think in terms of processing queues. I've also used AIO for async disk operations and it has worked nicely.