Compare Asynchronous I/O (AIO) with Non-blocking synchronous I/O (NIO)

在Java 7中可能引入AIO，进一步优化Java处理I/O的性能。AIO全称是asynchronous i/o，有时也叫new i/o 2。可以参考下面网站查看详细的规范：

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nio/

 

其实，梳理java里的i/o操作，经历了几个阶段:最原始的i/o，以java.io.*包为代表，第二阶段，在jdk1.4里面引入了nio(non-blocking i/o)，这个主要以java.nio.*包为代表，后来java.io.*里的一些类也基于nio重新实现了。第三个阶段，就是aio。

 

对于aio，http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nio/presentations/TS-4222.pdf这个是个很好的介绍文章。aio和nio最大的区别是真正做到完全意义上的异步，事件驱动，而nio某种程度上还是同步实现。

 

"With non-blocking I/O, you're getting events through a selector when the channel is ready to do I/O. The asynchronous API gives you a notification when the I/O is completed.

 

For example, with a socket channel in a non-blocking mode, you register with a selector, and the selector will give you a notification when there is data on that socket to read. With the asynchronous I/O, you actually start the read, and the I/O will complete sometime later when the read has happened and there is data in your buffer.

 

In the asynchronous API we have what we call a completion handler. You specify a completion handler when you do your read, and the completion handler is invoked to tell you that the I/O operation has completed.

 

We put a lot of thought into how the asynchronous API would be used in server applications. You'll see in the asynchronous I/O package that we allow high-end servers to be able to plug in their own thread pools, have their own configuration of thread pools, and so on. "

 

non-blocking i/o是在jsr51中提出的,是基于reactor模式的.

 

 

aio包括在jsr203中,是基于proactor的.

http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/more_new_io.html

 

 

因为aio在java 7里面才会正式引入，那目前我们大部分时间还是在用nio，下面这个教程非常不错：

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/tutorials/j-nio/，介绍了所有nio的新功能。最直观的比较就是同样功能的新旧实现对比，比如说完成一个简单的文件复制功能。

 

原始的i/o实现类似于：

String infile = args[0]; String outfile = args[1]; Reader rr = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(infile)); Writer w = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outfile)); while (true) { char[] buf = new char[4 * 1024]; int r = rr.read(buf); if (r == -1) { break; } w.write(buf); } w.flush(); rr.close(); w.close(); 

 

而使用nio后，实现如下：

String infile = args[0]; String outfile = args[1]; FileInputStream fin = new FileInputStream(infile); FileOutputStream fout = new FileOutputStream(outfile); FileChannel fcin = fin.getChannel(); FileChannel fcout = fout.getChannel(); ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(1024); while (true) { buffer.clear(); int r = fcin.read(buffer); if (r == -1) { break; } buffer.flip(); fcout.write(buffer); } 

 

做一个简单的测试，会发现性能确实有很大地提高，当然在nio里面还提供了很多高级功能，比如direct buffer和memory-mapped file，他们的性能就更好了。

 

上面的代码用direct buffer实现就是：

String infile = args[0]; String outfile = args[1]; long begin = System.currentTimeMillis(); FileInputStream fin = new FileInputStream( infile ); FileOutputStream fout = new FileOutputStream( outfile ); FileChannel fcin = fin.getChannel(); FileChannel fcout = fout.getChannel(); ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect( 1024 ); while (true) { buffer.clear(); int r = fcin.read( buffer ); if (r==-1) { break; } buffer.flip(); fcout.write( buffer ); } 

 

而MMF的详细介绍，可以参考IBM上“如何提高系统性能指标”这篇文章：http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/java/l-java-performance/index.html。