ljsyscall

The man pages really do try to put you off using the syscalls. I only used getdents for the first time when I was writing a syscall interface for Lua https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall - not tried it on 8m files but you can set the buffer size so it should work. The native aio interface has advantages over the posix wrapper too, and some of the other interfaces. On the other hand the futex interface is not nice to use, as it requires architecture specific assembly which seems undocumented...

Another interesting combination would be: https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall this would work with LuaJIT: http://luajit.org/ The FFI in LuaJIT is kind of brilliant. Check yourself. EDIT: with FFI in LuaJIT you can jump very comfortably between the high-level Lua code and low-level native calls. It's almost addictive. And the code is running X times faster than the Lua baseline (X between single-digit and triple-digit values).

Only downside with LuaAPR is you're back to writing Apache style servers, with an OS thread for every connection instead of using non-blocking sockets where possible (Didn't find any support for nonblocking sockets or a select\poll variant in the linked docs) For my Lua server [1] I currently use the nixio library from the LuCI project and polling instead[2] Although the downside of both nixio and Lua/APR library is the use of compiled C bindings to manually interact with the virtual machine. The exciting development with LuaJIT is the high performance FFI that allows you to make system calls and create structs directly from in Lua[3], so I am currently considering switching from nixio to ljsyscall when I do a new version [4] [1]https://github.com/davidhollander/ox [2]http://neopallium.github.com/nixio/ [3]http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutori