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Understanding Eventloops (Tokio Internals)

· 3 min read
Abhishek Tripathi
Abhishek Tripathi
Curiosity brings awareness.

Prelude​

This is the first post in a four part series that will provide an understanding of the mechanics behind the Tokio runtime in Rust. This post focuses on the challenges in a multi-threaded event loop that force us to think of async runtimes like Tokio.

Index of the four part series:

  1. Visualizing Tokio Internals: Part I - Multi-Threaded Event Loop / Server
  2. Visualizing Tokio Internals: Part II - Reactor
  3. Visualizing Tokio Internals: Part III - Wakers
  4. Visualizing Tokio Internals: Part IV - Executors

Multi-Threaded Event Loop / Server​

What challenges in a multi-threaded event loop force us to think of async runtimes like Tokio?

Phase 0: The Problem​

Learning Objective
After reading this you will be able to answer:

Why do we need async runtimes like Tokio?

  • Resource Efficiency: Traditional thread-per-connection models waste system resources
  • Scalability: Async enables handling thousands of connections with minimal overhead
  • Performance: Event-driven architecture reduces context switching and memory usage
  • Cost-Effective: Better resource utilization means lower infrastructure costs