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

Author

Bhattacharya, Shourya P. ; Apte, Varsha

Author_Institution

Kanwal Rekhi Sch. of Inf. Technol., Indian Inst. of Technol., Bombay

fYear

0

fDate

0-0 0

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

10

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, 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

Keywords

IP networks; Linux; operating system kernels; parallel processing; transport protocols; Linux TCP-IP measurement study; Linux kernel 2.4; Linux kernel 2.6; SMP system; buffer copying; checksumming; multiple processors; operating system; parallel processing; processor per connection model; protocol stack implementation; Costs; Degradation; Kernel; Linux; Operating systems; Parallel processing; Processor scheduling; Protocols; Scalability; TCPIP;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communication System Software and Middleware, 2006. Comsware 2006. First International Conference on

Conference_Location

New Delhi

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9575-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/COMSWA.2006.1665153

Filename

1665153