TokioConf 2026 - Less Tokio is More Tokio: Strategies for Accelerating a.... by Weston PaceLu Qiu

Less Tokio is More Tokio: Strategies for Accelerating a Rust Native Search Database by Weston Pace, Lu Qiu In this talk we will review lessons learned optimizing a search database built for both object storage and local high speed disks. By redesigning our I/O loop to utilize fewer tokio tasks, eagerly polling futures when submitting the I/O, and using a push/pull scheduling API we were able to hit storage rooflines with a rust-native storage layer, built on top of tokio. We will show our initial approach, discuss how we profiled a complex asynchronous application, review the hot spots and show how they were related to tokio, and then demonstrate how we were able to come up with a new design that achieved higher performance without sacrificing simplicity of API. Video Production by Confreaks Follow Confreaks 👇 https://confreaks.com https://confreaks.bsky.social https://x.com/confreaks