At this year's Scottish Ruby Conference, I gave a talk about EventMachine, slides are available. Amidst the hype around Node.js it's too easy to forget that Ruby has had evented I/O libraries for years. EventMachine, libebb, rev, cool.io, to name a few. As a general introduction I recommend reading Dan Kegel's article on the C10K problem, the problem of handling 10000 server connections on a single machine. It introduces all the evented approaches that have been implemented in the different operating systems over the last some 15 years.

In preparation for the talk I got curious about EventMachine's innards. So I thought it'd be nice to share my findings with you. Node.js kids, pay attention, this concerns you as well. It may be JavaScript, but in the end Node.js works in a similar fashion, though it builds on libev, which does most of the plumbing for the different operating system implementations of non-blocking I/O.

Most of the magic happens inside the C++ part of EventMachine, so now's as good a time as any to dig into it and find out how it works. There'll be code in here, not assembler, but I'll be throwing constants, standard library functions and TCP networking bits (from C, not from Ruby) at you. There's no magic however, and when in doubt, consult the man pages. You do know about man pages, right? They're awesome.

while(true): The Event Loop

EventMachine is based on the idea of an event loop, which is basically nothing more than an endless loop. The standard snippet of code you're wrapping all your evented code is this:

EM.run do # go forth and handle events end

You can look at the details of what the method does in its full glory. Other than initializing some things, it dives down into the C++ layer immediately, and it's where most of the magic happens from now on.

Three C/C++ extension files are of importance, ext/rubymain.cpp is the bridge between Ruby and the C code layer. It uses Ruby's C functions, mostly to convert datatypes for the later below. It then calls into code defined in ext/cmain.cpp , which in turn bridges the C and the C++ code.

When you call EM.run to start the event loop, it calls down into the C layer to t_run_machine_without_threads , which is called as run_machine , and which in turn calls EventMachine_t::Run() , whose interesting bits are shown below.

while (true) { _UpdateTime(); if (!_RunTimers()) break; _AddNewDescriptors(); _ModifyDescriptors(); if (!_RunOnce()) break; if (bTerminateSignalReceived) break; }

There's your event loop, doesn't look that scary now, right? It basically does five things:

Update the current time (line 2) Used in the next step to determine whether a timer should be fired

Run configured timers (line 3) All the timers specified through either add_timer or add_periodic_timer are run here. When you add a timer, EventMachine stores it in a map indexed with the time it's supposed to fire. This makes checking the list for the ones that should be fired in the current iteration a cheap operation. _RunTimers() iterates over the list of timers until it reaches one entry whose key (i.e. the time it's supposed to fire) is higher than the current time. Easy and efficient. On a side note, _RunTimers always returns true, so it's a bit weird that the return value is checked.

Add new descriptors (line 6) Whenever you open a new server connection, EventMachine adds an object representing the connection and the associated callbacks to this list. All connections and descriptors created in the last iteration are handled, which basically includes setting additional options if applicable and add them to the list of active connections. On the operating system level a descriptor represents a file handle or a socket connection. When you open a file, create a connection to another machine or create a server to listen for incoming connections, all of them are represented by descriptors, which are basically integers pointing into a list maintained by the operating system.

Modify descriptors (line 7) Modify existing descriptors, if applicable. This only has any effect when you're using epoll, which we'll get to later.

Run the event (line 9) Check all open file descriptors for new input. Read whatever's available, run the associated event callbacks. The heart of the event loop, worth taking a closer look below.

The event loop really is just an endless loop after all.

Open a Socket

When you call EM.connect to open a connection to a remote server, the connection will be immediately created, but it may not finish until later. The resulting connection will have a bunch of properties:

The descriptor is configured to not block on input and output by setting the socket option O_NONBLOCK . This way reads will immediately return when there's no data instead of waiting for some to arrive, and writes don't necessarily write all the data they're given. It also means that a call to connect() to create a new connection returns before it's fully created.

The Nagle algorithm is disabled to prevent the TCP stack from delaying sending packets by setting TCP_NODELAY on the socket. The operating system wants to buffer output to send fewer packets. Disabling Nagle causes any writes to be sent immediately. As EventMachine does internal buffering, it's preferrable for the data to be really sent when it's eventually written to a socket.

Reuse connections in TIME_WAIT state before they're fully removed from the networking stack. TCP keeps connections around for a while, even after they're closed to ensure that all data from the other side really, really made it to your end. Nice and all, but in environments with a high fluctuation of connnections, in the range of hundreds to thousands per second, you'll run out of file descriptors in no time.

Opening a socket is an immediate event, it happens as soon as you create a new connection. Running any callbacks on it won't happen until the next iteration of the event loop. That's why it's safe to e.g. fire up a new HTTP request and then attach callbacks to it. Even if that wouldn't be the case, EventMachine's Deferrables (not to be confused with EM.defer ) ensure that callbacks are fired even after the original event fired, when they're added at a later time.

What is immediately called, though, is the post_init method on the connection object.

Opening a network connection is just one thing you can do with EventMachine, but as it's the one thing you're most likely to do when you're using it, let's leave it at that.

Don't call us, we'll call you

Working with asynchronous code in EventMachine usually involves callbacks, unless you work with your own connection class. Libraries like em-http-request rely on deferrables to communicate with your application. They're fired when a HTTP request finished or failed. But how does a library keep track of data that only comes in bit by bit?

The answer is simply buffering. Which brings us to the core of the event loop, checking sockets for input, which is done from the ominous _RunOnce() method in the code snippet above. EventMachine can utilize three mechanisms to check descriptors for new input.

select(*)

The default is using select() , a standard system call to check a collection of file descriptors for input, by way of Ruby's implementation rb_thread_select() , which wraps the call to select() with a bunch of code ensuring thread safety.

Using select() pretty much works everywhere, and is perfectly fine up to a certain number of file descriptors. If you're simply serving an asynchronous web application or API using EventMachine, this may be totally acceptable.

Implementing this way of handling I/O is rather straight-forward, if you look at the implementation. Collect all file descriptors that may be of interest, feed them into select, read and/or write data when possible.

What makes using select() a bit cumbersome is that you always have to assemble a list of all file descriptors for every call to _RunOnce() , so EventMachine iterates over all registered descriptors with every loop. After select ran, it loops over all file descriptors again, checking to see if select marked them as ready for reads and/or writes.

When select() marks a descriptor as ready for read or write operations that means the socket will not block when data is read from or written to it. In the case of reading that usually means the operating system has some data buffered somewhere, and it's safe to read that data without having to wait for it to arrive, which in turn would block the call.

Instead of using select() , EventMachine could also use poll() instead, which just handles a bit nicer in general, but is not available in the Ruby VM.

epoll

epoll is Linux' implementation for multiplexing I/O across a large number of file descriptors.

The basic steps of using epoll are simple:

Set up an epoll instance using epoll_create , done initially when the event loop is created. This creates a virtual file descriptor pointing to a data structure that keeps track of all real file descriptors associated with it in the next step. You only need to reference this single file descriptor later, so there's no need to collect a list of all file descriptors, as is the case when select() is used.

Register interest for events on a file descriptor using epoll_ctl on the epoll instance created above. This is used in _AddNewDescriptors and _ModifyDescriptors to register and update EventMachine's file descriptors with epoll. In fact, both methods only do anything noteworthy when epoll is used. Otherwise they just iterate over a list of descriptors, pretty much doing nothing with them.

Wait for input with epoll_wait for a specified duration. You can wait forever, return immediately if nothing happened, or wait for a specific amount of time. EventMachine seems to have chosen to return immediately if there's no activity. There's an alternative implementation calculating the time to wait based on the likelihood of a specific event (e.g a timer firing) to fire on the next event loop iteration, but it doesn't seem to ever be used. Seems to be a relict from the time it could also be used as a C++ library.

epoll events are registered for both reads and writes, with epoll_wait returning the number of file descriptors that are ready for both events.

Using epoll has a big advantage, aside from being much more efficient than select in general for larger sets of file descriptors. It spares code using it the burden of constantly iterating over a list of file descriptors. Instead you just register them once, and then only iterate over the ones affected by the last call to epoll_wait .

So epoll requires a bit more work when you add or modify connections, but is a bit nicer on the eyes when it comes to actually polling them for I/O availability.

Note that epoll support must be explicitly enabled using EM.epoll .

kqueue

kqueue is the BSD equivalent of epoll, and is available on e.g. FreeBSD and Mac OS X. It works very similar to epoll. If you want to know more details, I'd suggest reading the paper on it by Jonathan Lemon.

You can enable kqueue support using EM.kqueue , which is, just like EM.epoll , a noop on systems that don't support it. Hopefully future EM versions will use whatever's available on a particular system as default.

Call me already!

All three mechanisms used have one thing in common: when data is read, receive_data is called immediately, which brings us back to the question of how a connection objects collects data coming in.

Whenever data is ready to be consumed from a socket, EventMachine calls EventDescriptor::Read() , which reads a bunch of data from the socket, in turn calling read() on the file descriptor, and then immediately executes the callback associated with the descriptor, which usually ends up calling receive_data with the data that was just read. Note that the callback here refers to something defined on the C++ level, not yet a Ruby block you'd normally use in an asynchronous programming model.

receive_data is where you will usually either buffer data or run some action immediately. em-http-request feeds the data coming in directly into an HTTP parser. Whatever you do in here, make it quick, don't process the data for too long. A common pattern in libraries built on EventMachine is to use a Deferrable object to keep track of a request's state, firing callbacks when it either succeeded or failed.

Which brings me to the golden rule of programming with libraries like EventMachine and Node.js: DON'T BLOCK THE EVENT LOOP!! Defer whatever work you can to a later run of the loop when it makes sense, or push it to another asynchronous processing facility, e.g. a message queue like RabbitMQ or Redis' Pub/Sub.

In a similar fashion, whenever you write data to a connection using send_data , it's first buffered, and not actually sent until the socket is ready for a non-blocking call to write() . Hence all three implementations check for both read and write availability of a descriptor.

Fibers vs. Spaghetti

Where do Ruby's Fibers come in here? Callbacks can easily lead to spaghetti code, especially when you have to nest them to run multiple asynchronous actions in succession.

Fibers can stop execution of a process flow at any time and yield control to some other, controlling entity or another Fiber. You could, for example, wrap a single HTTP request into a fiber and yield back control when all the callbacks have been assigned.

In the callbacks you then resume the Fiber again, so that processing flow turns into a synchronous, procedural style again.

def get(url) Fiber.new do current_fiber = Fiber.current request = EM::HttpRequest.new(url).get request.callback { current_fiber.resume(request) } request.errback { current_fiber.resume(request) } Fiber.yield end end

Fiber.yield returns whatever object it was handed in Fiber.resume . Wrap this in a method and boom, there's your synchronous workflow. Now all you need to do is call get('http://paperplanes.de') and assign something with the return value. Many props to Xavier Shay for digging into the Goliath source to find out how that stuff works. Helped me a lot to understand how that stuff works. If you never had a proper use case for Fibers in real life, you do now.

em-synchrony is a library doing just that for a lot of existing EventMachine libraries, and Goliath is an evented web server, wrapping a Rack-style API using Fibers.

Things you should be reading

Here's a bunch of free reading tips for ya. These books are pretty old, but have gone through some revisions and updates, and they're still the classics when it comes to lower level Unix (network) programming and understanding TCP/IP, which I consider very important. TCP/IP Illustrated is one of the best books I've read so far, and I consider it essential knowledge to be aware of what happens under the networking hood.

Also, read the fine man pages. There's a whole bunch of good documentation installed on every Unix-style system, and I linked to a couple of them relevant to this post already. Read it.

yield

This concludes today's whirlwind tour through some of EventMachine's internals. There's actually not too much magic happening under the covers, it's just wrapped into a bit too much code layering for my taste. But you be the judge.

Play with EventMachine and/or Node.js if you haven't already, try to wrap your head around the asynchronous programming model. But for the love of scaling, don't look at evented and asynchronous I/O as the sole means of scaling, because it's not.