Append-only server performance

I'm building a small web server for learning purposes.

For each incoming POST request I'm planning to append the content to a file.

• I'm开发者_C百科 using ZeroMQ sockets for communicating with the file-append process. Do I need to take special care with the file operations (fopen, fseek)?

• Considering a typical Amazon EC2 instance and that each request has at most 1kb, how many file-append operations per second can my server handle?

Thanks!

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Basic concerns should be followed, what happens if multiple processes are run and receive messages. What happens if you run out of disk space or a write fails?

Are you after synchronous writing to disk or is buffered, and potential of log corruption, acceptable? fopen and friends are buffered, consider open and friends for non-buffered writes.

Performance is tied to whether you can batch writes, use buffering, or want synchronous writes to disk. I think Amazon provide some IOPS details, certainly other developers have published results:

http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/

http://blog.dt.org/index.php/2010/06/amazon-ec2-io-performance-local-emphemeral-disks-vs-raid0-striped-ebs-volumes/

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=132387