3 ms·

For watching filesystem events FreeBSD's kqueue is much more difficult to use correctly though, and in my experience it certainly doesn't outperform inotify. i

For watching filesystem events FreeBSD's kqueue is much more difficult to use correctly though, and in my experience it certainly doesn't outperform inotify. inotify (and now, fanotify) are specifically designed to watch for filesystem events, whereas kqueue is a generic event system used for many things. In many ways that's better, but it this lack of specialisation also comes with some drawbacks.

rwaksmunski 4y ago
From what I can recall, the performance issues were on the network side. I suspected accept() calls not scaling right, but instrumentation on Linux was quite poor at that time. They had nothing like dtrace back then so I can't be certain.