We’ve been hard at work on the next major revision of Tokio, Rust’s asynchronous runtime. Today, a complete rewrite of the scheduler has been submitted as a pull request. The result is huge performance and latency improvements. Some benchmarks saw a 10x speed up! It is always unclear how much these kinds of improvements impact “full stack” use cases, so we’ve also tested how these scheduler improvements impacted use cases like Hyper and Tonic (spoiler: it’s really good).

In preparation for working on the new scheduler, I spent time searching for resources on scheduler implementations. Besides existing implementations, I did not find much. I also found the source of existing implementations difficult to navigate. To remedy this, I tried to keep Tokio’s new scheduler implementation as clean as possible. I also am writing this detailed article on implementing the scheduler in hope that others in similar positions find it useful.

The article starts with a high level overview of scheduler design, including work-stealing schedulers. It then gets into the details of specific optimizations made in the new Tokio scheduler.

source: HN