Marinos, I;
Watson, RNM;
Handley, M;
(2014)
Network Stack Specialization for Performance.
In: Bustamante, FE and Hu, YC and Krishnamurthy, A and Ratnasamy, S, (eds.)
SIGCOMM '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on SIGCOMM.
(pp. pp. 175-186).
Association for Computer Machinery (ACM): New York, USA.
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Abstract
Contemporary network stacks are masterpieces of generality, supporting many edge-node and middle-node functions. Generality comes at a high performance cost: current APIs, memory models, and implementations drastically limit the effectiveness of increasingly powerful hardware. Generality has historically been required so that individual systems could perform many functions. However, as providers have scaled services to support millions of users, they have transitioned toward thousands (or millions) of dedicated servers, each performing a few functions. We argue that the overhead of generality is now a key obstacle to effective scaling, making specialization not only viable, but necessary. We present Sandstorm and Namestorm, web and DNS servers that utilize a clean-slate userspace network stack that exploits knowledge of application-specific workloads. Based on the netmap framework, our novel approach merges application and network-stack memory models, aggressively amortizes protocol-layer costs based on application-layer knowledge, couples tightly with the NIC event model, and exploits microarchitectural features. Simultaneously, the servers retain use of conventional programming frameworks. We compare our approach with the FreeBSD and Linux stacks using the nginx web server and NSD name server, demonstrating 2–10× and 9× improvements in web-server and DNS throughput, lower CPU usage, linear multicore scaling, and saturated NIC hardware.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Network Stack Specialization for Performance |
| Event: | SIGCOMM 14: 2014 ACM conference on SIGCOMM, 17-22 August 2014, Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Location: | Chicago, IL |
| Dates: | 17 August 2014 - 22 August 2014 |
| ISBN-13: | 9781450328364 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/2619239.2626311 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/2619239.2626311 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Network stacks; network performance; networkstack specialization; clean-slate design |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1521000 |
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