sendfile/splice - Non-blocking input?

[Aiko Barz <aiko@chroot.de>]

Hello,

is sendfile/splice completely non-blocking on the input side?

I am writing a small webserver for educational reasons. I use epoll to
deal with the network part. From what I have read, I have to avoid
blocking code under all circumstances. And the linux implementation
of sendfile seems to block until the file enters the pagecache.

Most of the docs are not completely up to date. I figured out, that
sendfile is now a frontend for splice. So, does it still block?

Or differently asked: May I call sendfile directly from the few epoll
threads or do I have to execute sendfile/splice within independent
worker threads?

Kind regards,
	Aiko Barz
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