With the right kernel settings, Linux can give you per-process I/O stats. Good to know.

I/O library from the libev folks. Actively maintained, it appears.

An explanation of a divide-and-conquer algorithm in the context of a very high-performance parallel I/O system. It processes 235 MB/s even as the disk can only deliver 150 MB/s. This validates my experience that global buffers are pretty much guaranteed in high-performance systems.

Some light reading.

"As you can see I'm using ORDER BY NULL clause as otherwise MySQL will sort the data after performing group by which is overhead we're not looking to measure. This is actually good trick to use for cases when you do not need GROUP BY results sorted - it can significantly improve performance in some cases."