Does Socket IO involve Disk IO?

Question

If one process sends data through a socket to another process on the same machine how likely is it that a disk read/write will occur during transmission? There seems to be a soc

Answer 1

In the POSIX model, as well as many other kernels, files are not only in disks. Instead, every device is represented by a "special file". They live in directories or some sort of namespace, but accessing them is not disk access, even if they are placed in a directory on disk.

If you have memory pressure, then it's possible for some of your data buffers to get swapped out. But this has nothing to do with the "file" nature of devices. It's just using the disk as additional RAM.

So "Yes, socket I/O is file I/O, but not disk read/write."