Architectural characterization of TCP/IP packet processing on the Pentium® M microprocessor

A majority of the current and next generation server applications (Web services, e-commerce, storage, etc.) employ TCP/IP as the communication protocol of choice. As a result, the performance of these applications is heavily dependent on the efficient TCP/IP packet processing within the termination nodes. This dependency becomes even greater as the bandwidth needs of these applications grow from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps in the near future. Motivated by this, we focus on the following: (a) to understand the performance behavior of the various modes of TCP/IP processing, (b) to analyze the underlying architectural characteristics of TCP/IP packet processing and (c) to quantify the computational requirements of the TCP/IP packet processing component within realistic workloads. We achieve these goals by performing an in-depth analysis of packet processing performance on Intel´s state-of-the-art low power Pentium® M microprocessor running the Microsoft Windows* Server 2003 operating system. Some of our key observations are - (i) that the mode of TCP/IP operation can significantly affect the performance requirements, (ii) that transmit-side processing is largely compute-intensive as compared to receive-side processing which is more memory-bound and (iii) that the computational requirements for sending/receiving packets can form a substantial component (28% to 40%) of commercial server workloads. From our analysis, we also discuss architectural as well as stack-related improvements that can help achieve higher server network throughput and result in improved application performance.