Mirage Source

IOCP - Input/Output Completion Port

To have it made simple, just think of it this way. You have a few threads sleeping in what is known as a thread pool. They are doing nothing. Suddenly a new socket event arises (a message has been received), then one fo those sleeping threads awakes with the event and lets you handle it. Since you have several threads sleeping you can handle several packets at the same time, provided each of them comes from a different player, otherwise it will crush.

it's the way you use threads to handle socket (or any other input / output) events in the best possible efficient way.

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