base-system@gentoo.org Gentoo Base System In an ideal world, Assuan is irrelevant. Assuan's primary use is to allow a client to interact with a non-persistent server. Using Assuan, this is accomplished by forking a subprocess and communicating with it via, for example, a pipe or unix domain socket. This method is neither elegant nor efficient especially when there is a lot of data spread across several transactions: not only is there a penalty for an increased number of context switches, but also a significant amount of data is MEMCPYed from the client to a file descriptor and from the file descriptor to the server.