8 Timer Implementation Patterns for Systems and Network Software

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A practical guide to system-side timer patterns, from hardware interrupts and OS APIs to timer wheels, heaps, polling, and event loops.
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System-side timers can be built in eight different ways — from hardware interrupts and OS APIs to timer wheels, heaps, and event loops. This article breaks down each approach and explains why timer wheels and event-loop-integrated timers (like libevent or epoll/timerfd) are the go-to choices for production networking software handling thousands of concurrent sessions, such as BGP or tunnel keepalives.