In this post, we will explore how Unix pipes are implemented in Linux by iteratively optimizing a test program that writes and reads data through a pipe.1 We will begin with a simple program with a throughput of around 3.5GiB/s, and improve its performance twentyfold. The improvements will be informed by profiling the program using Linux’s perf tooling.2 The code is available on GitHub. The post was inspired by reading a highly optimized FizzBuzz program, which pushes output to a pipe at a rate ...