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I recall reading that Netflix chose FreeBSD a decade ago due to asynchronous disk IO was (and still is?) broken and/or limited to fixed block offsets. So nginx just works better on FreeBSD versus Linux for serving static files from spinning rust or SSD.

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This used to be the case, but with io_uring, Linux has very much non-broken buffered async I/O. (Windows has copied io_uring pretty much verbatim now, but that's a different story.)

Could you expand more on the Windows io_uring bit please?

I have run Debian based Linux my entire life and recently moved circumstantially to Windows. I have no idea how it's kernel model works and I find io_uring exciting.

Wasn't aware of any adoption of io_uring ideas in Windows land, sounds interesting

Windows has had “IO completion ports” since the 1990s which work well and are high performance async for disk/network/other IO operations.

This isn't the same as the old Windows async I/O. ptrwis' links are what I thought of (and it's essentially a 1:1 copy of io_uring, as I understand it).

https://windows-internals.com/i-o-rings-when-one-i-o-operati...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringapi...

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