Modeling and Analysis of OS Performance in High-Speed Networks

Interrupt overhead of high-speed network devices can have a significant negative impact on the performance of traditional operating system. The negative impact is primarily due to interrupt overhead associated with the intense arrival of high-speed network packets. This paper presents models and analytical techniques for capturing the behavior and studying the performance of interrupt-driven kernels due to such high packet arrival rate. We first present an analytical study for the ideal system when interrupt overhead is ignored We then present a second model which describes the impact of high interrupt rate on OS performance. The performance is studied in terms of system throughput, CPU availability, and system latency.