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A measurement study of the Linux TCP/IP stack performance and scalability on SMP systems

DSpace at IIT Bombay

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Title A measurement study of the Linux TCP/IP stack performance and scalability on SMP systems
 
Creator BHATTACHARYA, SHOURYA P
APTE, VARSHA
 
Subject ip networks
linux
operating system kernels
parallel processing
transport protocols
 
Description 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, checksumming 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 behavior 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.
 
Publisher IEEE
 
Date 2009-09-19T07:13:52Z
2011-11-28T08:51:03Z
2011-12-15T09:57:52Z
2009-09-19T07:13:52Z
2011-11-28T08:51:03Z
2011-12-15T09:57:52Z
2006
 
Type Article
 
Identifier Proceedings of the First International Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware, New Delhi, India, 8-12 January 2006, 1-10
0-7803-9575-1
10.1109/COMSWA.2006.1665153
http://hdl.handle.net/10054/1645
http://dspace.library.iitb.ac.in/xmlui/handle/10054/1645
 
Language en