Profiling and reducing processing overheads in TCP/IP

Author

Kay, Jonathan ; Pasquale, Joseph

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., California Univ., San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Volume

4

Issue

6

fYear

1996

fDate

12/1/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

817

Lastpage

828

Abstract

This paper presents detailed measurements of processing overheads for the Ultrix 4.2a implementation of TCP/IP network software running on a DECstation 5000/200. The performance results were used to uncover throughput and latency bottlenecks. We present a scheme for improving throughput when sending large messages by avoiding most checksum computations in a relatively safe manner. We also show that for the implementation we studied, reducing latency (when sending small messages) is a more difficult problem because processing overheads are spread over many operations; gaining a significant savings would require the optimization of many different mechanisms. This is especially important because, when processing a realistic workload, we have found that nondata-touching operations consume more time in aggregate than data-touching operations

Keywords

channel capacity; local area networks; performance evaluation; transport protocols; wide area networks; DECstation 5000/200; TCP/IP network software; Ultrix 4.2a implementation; checksum computations; data-touching operations; large messages; latency bottlenecks; nondata-touching operations; optimization; processing overheads; realistic workload; small messages; throughput bottleneck; Computer science; Delay; Intelligent networks; Local area networks; Size measurement; Software measurement; TCPIP; Telecommunication traffic; Throughput; Wide area networks;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-6692

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/90.556340

Filename

556340