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How big is (approximately) an I/O syscall overhead on Linux from C program, I mean how bad is running e.g. many small read / write operations compared with read / write on large buffers (on regular files or network sockets)? App is strongly multithreaded.
Syscalls take at least 1-2 microseconds on most modern machines just for the syscall overhead, and much more time if they’re doing anything complex that could block or sleep. Expect at least 20 microseconds and up to the order of milliseconds for IO. Compare this with a tiny function call or macro that reads a byte from a userspace buffer, which is likely to complete in a matter of nanoseconds (maybe 200 ns on a bad day).