[Submitted on 4 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 26 Jul 2026 (this version, v3)]

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Abstract:We study how modern database systems can leverage the Linux io_uring interface for efficient, low-overhead I/O. io_uring is an asynchronous system call batching interface that unifies storage and network operations, addressing limitations of existing Linux I/O interfaces. However, naively replacing traditional I/O interfaces with io_uring does not necessarily yield performance benefits. To demonstrate when io_uring delivers the greatest benefits and how to use it effectively in modern database systems, we evaluate it in two use cases: Integrating io_uring into a storage-bound buffer manager and using it for high-throughput data shuffling in network-bound analytical workloads. We further analyze how advanced io_uring features, such as registered buffers and passthrough I/O, affect end-to-end performance. Our study shows when low-level optimizations translate into tangible system-wide gains and how architectural choices influence these benefits. Building on these insights, we derive practical guidelines for designing I/O-intensive systems using io_uring and validate their effectiveness in a case study of PostgreSQL's recent io_uring integration, where applying our guidelines yields a performance improvement of 14%.

Submission history

From: Matthias Jasny [view email]
[v1] Thu, 4 Dec 2025 14:43:03 UTC (504 KB)
[v2] Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:44:22 UTC (505 KB)
[v3] Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:16:24 UTC (766 KB)