How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Quality post, thanks for sharing!

We will proceed as follows:

1. A first slow version of our pipe test bench;
2. How pipes are implemented internally, and why writing and reading from them is slow;
3. How the vmsplice and splice syscalls let us get around some (but not all!) of the slowness;
4. A description of Linux paging, leading up to a faster version using huge pages;
5. The final optimization, replacing polling with busy looping;
6. Some closing thoughts.