A Measurement Study of the Linux TCP/IP Stack Performance and Scalability on SMP systems

@inproceedings{citeulike:2903928, abstract = {The performance of the protocol stack implementation of an operating system can greatly impact the performance of networked applications that run on it. In this paper, we present a thorough measurement study and comparison of the network stack performance of the two popular Linux kernels: 2.4 and 2.6, with a special focus on their performance on SMP architectures. Our findings reveal that interrupt processing costs, device driver overheads, check-summing and buffer copying are dominant overheads of protocol processing. We find that although raw CPU costs are not very different between the two kernels, Linux 2.6 shows vastly improved scalability, attributed to better scheduling and kernel locking mechanisms. We also uncover an anomalous behaviour in which Linux 2.6 performance degrades when packet processing for a single connection is distributed over multiple processors. This, however, verifies the superiority of the "processor per connection" model for parallel processing.}, author = {Bhattacharya, S. P. and Apte, V. }, booktitle = {Communication System Software and Middleware, 2006. Comsware 2006. First International Conference on}, citeulike-article-id = {2903928}, journal = {Communication System Software and Middleware, 2006. Comsware 2006. First International Conference on}, keywords = {algorithms, caching, communications, design, distributed, multithreading, operating-systems, performance, realtime, scalability, server, software-engineering, throughput}, pages = {1--10}, posted-at = {2008-06-18 00:55:18}, priority = {0}, title = {A Measurement Study of the Linux TCP/IP Stack Performance and Scalability on SMP systems}, url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs\_all.jsp?arnumber=1665153}, year = {2006} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:2903928 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2903928 TI - A Measurement Study of the Linux TCP/IP Stack Performance and Scalability on SMP systems T2 - Communication System Software and Middleware, 2006. Comsware 2006. First International Conference on JF - Communication System Software and Middleware, 2006. Comsware 2006. First International Conference on SP - 1 EP - 10 N2 - The performance of the protocol stack implementation of an operating system can greatly impact the performance of networked applications that run on it. In this paper, we present a thorough measurement study and comparison of the network stack performance of the two popular Linux kernels: 2.4 and 2.6, with a special focus on their performance on SMP architectures. Our findings reveal that interrupt processing costs, device driver overheads, check-summing and buffer copying are dominant overheads of protocol processing. We find that although raw CPU costs are not very different between the two kernels, Linux 2.6 shows vastly improved scalability, attributed to better scheduling and kernel locking mechanisms. We also uncover an anomalous behaviour in which Linux 2.6 performance degrades when packet processing for a single connection is distributed over multiple processors. This, however, verifies the superiority of the "processor per connection" model for parallel processing. KW - algorithms KW - caching KW - communications KW - design KW - distributed KW - multithreading KW - operating-systems KW - performance KW - realtime KW - scalability KW - server KW - software-engineering KW - throughput AU - Bhattacharya, SP AU - Apte, V PY - 2006/// UR - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1665153 ER -