iox: I/O tools for Go programs

Package iox contains two Go objects of note: Filer and BufferFile.

https://godoc.org/crawshaw.io/iox

Filer

Managing file resources in highly-concurrent programs gets tricky. A process easily, even typically, has more in-flight goroutines than allowed file descriptors from the operating system. This requires programmers limit the number of open descriptors with some kind of throttle object.

An iox.Filer wraps the functions used to open file descriptors and makes sure it never opens more than some maximum (typically derived from the processes rlimit).

It wraps *os.File pointers in a new object which returns the file descriptor allotment to the Filer pool when Close is called.

BufferFile

A BufferFile is a file-like object that stores its first N bytes in memory, and the rest in a temporary file on disk.

It is designed for loads where the typical case fits in some small amount of memory, but the worst case requires more space than can be provisioned in RAM. (This usually means a server is handling tens to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests.)

BufferFile does not create its temporary backing file until its contents exceed the memory buffer, so the typical case does not require any file descriptors. Programs can begin (and usually complete) processing a request without ever blocking on file descriptors, meaning a server never runs into file descriptors as a bottleneck when processing a typical workload.

Installation

Install with:

go get crawshaw.io/iox

There are no version numbers yet, this package needs some time to bake.