I wrote up a hand wavy way of doing a generalized sendfile here: http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/splice.pdf http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/splice.pdf and linux took so

I wrote up a hand wavy way of doing a generalized sendfile here: http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/splice.pdf http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/splice.pdf and linux took some of that. As I recall, they don't use it much because the user land apps (like web servers) end up touching the data for TLS (https). Netflix/FreeBSD are working with the NIC folks to get the byte by byte TLS pushed down in the card along with the TCP offload. I think they'll get there first because BSD is so heavily used by CDN people (not just Netflix, Limelight is very active in BSD as well).