Mazzoli: How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Francesco Mazzoli delvesdeeply into the kernel's implementation of pipes (and more) in anattempt to maximize the throughput of data.

The post was inspired by reading a highly optimized FizzBuzzprogram, which pushes output to a pipe at a rate of ~35GiB/s on mylaptop. Our first goal will be to match that speed, explainingevery step as we go along. We'll also add an additionalperformance-improving measure, which is not needed in FizzBuzzsince the bottleneck is actually computing the output, not IO, atleast on my machine.