Asynchronous Programming with Seastar

Nadav Har’El - nyh@ScyllaDB.com

Avi Kivity - avi@ScyllaDB.com

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10 Fibers

Seastar continuations are normally short, but often chained to one another, so that one continuation does a bit of work and then schedules another continuation for later. Such chains can be long, and often even involve loopings - see the following section, “Loops”. We call such chains “fibers” of execution.

These fibers are not threads - each is just a string of continuations - but they share some common requirements with traditional threads. For example, we want to avoid one fiber getting starved while a second fiber continuously runs its continuations one after another. As another example, fibers may want to communicate - e.g., one fiber produces data that a second fiber consumes, and we wish to ensure that both fibers get a chance to run, and that if one stops prematurely, the other doesn’t hang forever.

TODO: Mention fiber-related sections like loops, semaphores, gates, pipes, etc.

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