a glob of nerdishness

Mike Ash just finished another accurate and detailed series covering an interesting low-level topic, this time explaining all about Grand Central Dispatch.

Apple’s thread pools help reduce processor contention, but I’d been mulling over how to best use queues for performing file operations optimally. Mike nails it in this last post: create a hierarchy of custom queues that end up funneling operations through one custom queue per disk. It’d be interesting to wrap this technique in a higher-level API that dealt with disk and other bottlenecks in a more automatic manner.