When raw throughput collides with real-world complexity, the fastest I/O model isn’t always the winner Network Programming Battle: io_uring in Rust vs epoll in Go When raw throughput collides with real-world complexity, the fastest I/O model isn’t always the winner Two approaches to high-performance I/O: raw speed versus operational simplicity. Your production constraints determine which architecture wins, not benchmark numbers alone. Our API gateway — handling 2.8 million requests per second across 47 microservices — was bleeding money. Each 1% latency improvement translated to $240K annually in infrastructure savings. The conventional wisdom was clear: migrate from Go’s epoll to Rust’s io_uring for that magical 40% performance boost everyone talks about. Six months and 180K lines of rewritten code later, we learned something the benchmarks never told us.…