Rubygem-celluloid-io

Evented IO for Celluloid actors

CelluloidIO provides an event-driven IO system for building fast, scalable network applications that integrates directly with the Celluloid actor library, making it easy to combine both threaded and evented concepts. CelluloidIO is ideal for servers which handle large numbers of mostly-idle connections, such as Websocket servers or chat/messaging systems.

CelluloidIO provides a different class of actor one that’s slightly slower and heavier than standard Celluloid actors, but one which contains a high-performance reactor just like EventMachine or Cool.io. This means CelluloidIO actors have the power of both Celluloid actors and evented I/O loops. Unlike certain other evented I/O systems which limit you to a single event loop per process, CelluloidIO lets you make as many actors as you want, system resources permitting.

Rather than callbacks, CelluloidIO exposes a synchronous API built on duck types of Ruby’s own IO classes, such as TCPServer and TCPSocket. These classes work identically to their core Ruby counterparts, but in the scope of CelluloidIO actors provide “evented” performance. Since they’re drop-in replacements for the standard classes, there’s no need to rewrite every library just to take advantage of CelluloidIO’s event loop and you can freely switch between evented and blocking IO even over the lifetime of a single connection.