Observing TCP dynamics in real networks
SIGCOMM '92 Conference proceedings on Communications architectures & protocols
The importance of non-data touching processing overheads in TCP/IP
SIGCOMM '93 Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
HPDC '00 Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
Source-level IP packet bursts: causes and effects
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Direct Cache Access for High Bandwidth Network I/O
Proceedings of the 32nd annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Architectural Characterization of TCP/IP Packet Processing on the Pentium® M Microprocessor
HPCA '04 Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
ISPASS '03 Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software
TCP offload is a dumb idea whose time has come
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
On the impact of bursting on TCP performance
PAM'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement
End system optimizations for high-speed TCP
IEEE Communications Magazine
Characterization of network processing overheads in Xen
VTDC '06 Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing
Achieving 10Gbps network processing: are we there yet?
HiPC'08 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on High performance computing
IEEE 802.3az: the road to energy efficient ethernet
IEEE Communications Magazine
Introspective end-system modeling to optimize the transfer time of rate based protocols
Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Energy Systems: Where Energy, Computing and Communication Meet
Implementation of TCP large receive offload on open hardware platform
Proceedings of the first edition workshop on High performance and programmable networking
NetVM: high performance and flexible networking using virtualization on commodity platforms
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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With rapid advancements in Ethernet technology, Ethernet speeds have increased by 10 fold, from 1 to 10Gbps, in a period of 2-3 years. This sudden increase in speeds has outpaced the rate at which processor and memory speeds have been increasing, raising concerns that TCP/IP processing will not scale to these levels. As a result, applications running on commercial servers will not be able to take advantage of the increased Ethernet bandwidth. This has led to a flurry of activity in the industry and academia focused on finding ways to scale up TCP/IP processing to 10Gbps and beyond. In this paper, we propose a novel technique called "Receive Side Coalescing" (RSC) that increases TCP/IP processing efficiencies significantly. RSC allows NICs to identify packets that belong to same TCP/IP flow and coalesce them into a single large packet. As a result, TCP/IP stack has to process fewer packets reducing per packet processing costs. NIC can do this coalescing of packets during interrupt moderation time hence packet latency is not affected. We have collected packet traces and analyzed those to find out how much coalescing is possible in different scenarios. Our analysis shows that about 50% reduction in number of packets is possible. We have prototyped RSC on Windows and Linux to understand the benefits, and the results show that 2-7% of savings in CPU utilization is possible at 1Gbps speeds. Projection models developed to estimate processing costs at 10Gbps show that RSC can save up to 20% of the CPU.