Photon is a high-efficiency LibOS framework, based on a set of carefully selected C++ libs.

The role of LibOS is to connect user apps and the kernel. Following the principle of Least Astonishment, we designed Photon's API to be as consistent as possible with glibc and POSIX semantics. This flattens the learning curve for lib users and brings convenience when migrating legacy codebases.

Photon's runtime is driven by a coroutine lib. According to out tests, it has the fastest I/O performance in the open source world, even among different programing languages.

As to the project vision, we hope that Photon would help programs run as fast and agile as the photon particle, which exactly is the naming came from.

• Coroutine library (support multi-thread)
• Async event engine, natively integrated into coroutine scheduling (support epoll or io_uring)
• Multiple I/O engines: psync, posix_aio, libaio, io_uring
• Multiple socket implementations: tcp (level-trigger/edge-trigger), unix-domain, zero-copy, libcurl, TLS support, etc.
• A full functionality HTTP client/server (even faster than Nginx)
• A simple RPC client/server
• A POSIX-like filesystem abstraction and some implementations: local fs, http fs, fuse fs, etc.
• A bunch of useful tools: io-vector manipulation, resource pool, object cache, mem allocator, callback delegator, pre-compiled logging, ring buffer, etc.

While Photon has already encapsulated many mature OS functionalities, it remains keen to the latest kernel features, and prepared to wrap them into the framework. It is a real killer in the low level programing field.

Compare Photon and fio when reading an 3.5TB NVMe raw device.

Note that fio only enables 1 job (process).

Conclusion: Photon is faster than fio under this circumstance.

Compare TCP echo server performance, in descending order.

Note:

• Set up 16 echo clients(processes), with 16 connections per client, to give the maximum stress.
• Server's maximum network bandwidth is 32Gb. Server and client are all cloud VMs, 64Core 128GB, Intel Platinum CPU 2.70GHz
• boost::asio is a typical async + callback framework, which means you are NOT able to write sync style code.
• This test was only meant to compare per-core QPS, so we limited the thread number to 1, for instance, set GOMAXPROCS=1.

Conclusion: Photon socket has the best per-core QPS.

Compare Photon and Nginx when serving static files, using Apache Bench(ab) as client.

Note that Nginx only enables 1 worker (process).

Conclusion: Photon is faster than Nginx under this circumstance.

See the example about how to write a Photon program.

dnf install gcc-c++ epel-release cmake
dnf install openssl-devel libcurl-devel libaio-devel

apt install cmake
apt install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libaio-dev

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j

All the libs and executables will be saved in build/output.

# CentOS
dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools
dnf install gtest-devel gmock-devel gflags-devel fuse-devel libgsasl-devel
# Ubuntu
apt install libgtest-dev libgmock-dev libgflags-dev libfuse-dev libgsasl7-dev

cmake -D BUILD_TESTING=1 -D ENABLE_SASL=1 -D ENABLE_FUSE=1 -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
make -j
ctest

TODO: Add our commitment to this project, including history, current status in Alibaba Cloud, and future vision.