Asynchronous File I/O on Linux

[richard.pieri-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Richard Pieri)]

Again, this is not async I/O.  I'm not being pedantic.  I am trying to correct your gross misuse of the term "asynchronous".  Multiple simultaneous reads do not require async I/O.  They require multiple threads.

Anyway, I suspect that you are wasting your time with this.  Take a high performance database.  It goes fast because it doesn't go to disk.  Reads from cache happen on the order of microseconds, three orders of magnitude faster than reads from disk.  Shaving a few milliseconds off of read times from disk just makes a glacially slow process slightly less glacially slow.

You are also ignoring the effects of:
* The effect of multiple spindles in RAID sets
* RAID cache such as you'll find on large storage frames
* Solid-state drives which have no moving parts and thus negligible seek times.
* And probably a few other things that I don't recall off the top of my head.
Any of which will probably make what you are trying to do go slower due to much different timings.

--Rich P.