Question

I need a way to store large data chunks(~1-2MB) at a high rate (~200-300Mbit/s).
After some research I found several options:

• aio_write
• Direct_IO
• Carbon File Manager’s PBWriteForkAsync()
• default fwrite(), wrapped in a block and dispatched via GCD
• NSData’s appendData in an NSOperation
• …

This wiki page describes the state of aio_write under Linux. What I didn’t find was a similar page about the state of aio_write for Mac OS X.

NSOperation or Blocks+GCD seems to be a technique to achieve non-blocking IO. It is used in several open source IO libraries (e.g. https://github.com/mikeash/MAAsyncIO)

Has someone with a similar problem found a suitable solution?
Currently I tend towards PBWriteForkAsync as it takes some ‘tuning’parameters. It also should be 64-bit safe.

Answer 1

I don’t know MacOS very well, but I’d also try open and write syscalls from unistd.h with the non-blocking option O_NONBLOCK. reference