Network stack specialization for performance

Performance Characterization of the FreeBSD Network Stack

This paper analyzes the behavior of high-performance web servers along three axes: packet rate, number of connections, and communication latency. Modern, high-performance servers spend a significant fraction of time executing the network stack of the operating system—over 80% of the time for a web server. These servers must handle increasing packet rates, increasing numbers of connections, and ...

The Network Stack Trace: Performance diagnosis for networked systems

Transient network stalls that degrade application performance are frustrating to users and developers alike. Software bugs, network congestion, and intermittent connectivity all have the same symptoms—low throughput, high latency, and user-level timeouts. In this paper, we show how an end host can identify the sources of network stalls using only simple counters from its local network stack. By...

Efficient and General On-Stack Replacement for Aggressive Program Specialization

Efficient and General On-Stack Replacement for Aggressive Program Specialization

Efficient invalidation and dynamic replacement of executing code – on-stack replacement (OSR), is necessary to facilitate effective, aggressive, specialization of object-oriented programs that are dynamically loaded, incrementally compiled, and garbage collected. Extant OSR mechanisms restrict the performance potential of program specialization since their implementations are special-purpose an...

TCPIP Network Stack Performance in Linux Kernel 2.4 and 2.5

We discuss our findings on how well the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 TCPIP stack scales with multiple network interfaces and with the SMP network workloads on 100/1000 Mb Ethernet networks. We identify three hotspots in the Linux TCPIP stack: 1) inter-processor cache disruption on SMP environments, 2) inefficient copy routines, and 3) poor TCPIP stack scaling as network bandwidth increases. Our analysis s...