Epollbased

Epollbased is a term that generally refers to systems, applications, or programming techniques that leverage the epoll mechanism provided by the Linux kernel for efficient I/O event notification. Epoll is a scalable I/O event multiplexing mechanism that allows a single process to monitor multiple file descriptors (such as network sockets or files) for I/O events like readability, writability, or error conditions. Instead of constantly polling each file descriptor, epoll provides a way to be notified only when an event occurs on one of the monitored descriptors.

Systems described as "epollbased" typically employ this mechanism to handle a large number of concurrent connections or operations with minimal resource overhead. This is particularly common in high-performance network servers, real-time data processing applications, and other scenarios requiring efficient management of numerous I/O streams. The advantage of an epollbased approach lies in its ability to avoid the overhead associated with traditional methods like select() or poll(), which often require iterating through a list of all monitored file descriptors on each call, regardless of whether any events have occurred.

The core of an epollbased system involves the use of the epoll_create, epoll_ctl, and epoll_wait system calls. epoll_create creates an epoll instance, epoll_ctl adds or removes file descriptors from the watch list, and epoll_wait blocks until events are available on any of the registered descriptors. This design makes it a cornerstone for building scalable and responsive I/O-intensive applications on Linux.