issue: 3788369 Improvements from XLIO Socket / Storage API activity

[pasis]

Description

Scattered improvements cherry-picked from #109.

What

Scattered improvements cherry-picked from #109.

Why ?

Performance / code quality improvements.

Change type

What kind of change does this PR introduce?

• [ ] Bugfix
• [x] Feature
• [ ] Code style update
• [x] Refactoring (no functional changes, no api changes)
• [ ] Build related changes
• [ ] CI related changes
• [ ] Documentation content changes
• [ ] Tests
• [ ] Other

Check list

• [ ] Code follows the style de facto guidelines of this project
• [ ] Comments have been inserted in hard to understand places
• [ ] Documentation has been updated (if necessary)
• [ ] Test has been added (if possible)