U-Net: a user-level network interface for parallel and distributed computing
SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Exokernel: an operating system architecture for application-level resource management
SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Kernel Korner: kHTTPd, a Kernel-Based Web Server
Linux Journal
Kqueue - A Generic and Scalable Event Notification Facility
Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
A scalable and explicit event delivery mechanism for UNIX
ATEC '99 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Overclocking the Yahoo!: CDN for faster web page loads
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Improving network connection locality on multicore systems
Proceedings of the 7th ACM european conference on Computer Systems
Netmap: a novel framework for fast packet I/O
USENIX ATC'12 Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
MegaPipe: a new programming interface for scalable network I/O
OSDI'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud
Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
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Contemporary network stacks are masterpieces of generality, supporting a range of edge-node and middle-node functions. This generality comes at significant performance cost: current APIs, memory models, and implementations drastically limit the effectiveness of increasingly powerful hardware. Generality has historically been required to allow individual systems to perform many functions. However, as providers have scaled up services to support hundreds of millions of users, they have transitioned toward many thousands (or even millions) of dedicated servers performing narrow ranges of functions. We argue that the overhead of generality is now a key obstacle to effective scaling, making specialization not only viable, but necessary. This paper presents Sandstorm, a clean-slate userspace network stack that exploits knowledge of web server semantics, improving throughput over current off-the-shelf designs while retaining use of conventional operating-system and programming frameworks. Based on Netmap, our novel approach merges application and network-stack memory models, aggressively amortizes stack-internal TCP costs based on application-layer knowledge, tightly couples with the NIC event model, and exploits low-latency hardware access. We compare our approach to the FreeBSD and Linux network stacks with nginx as the web server, demonstrating ~3.5x throughput improvement, while experiencing low CPU utilization, linear scaling on multicore systems, and saturating current NIC hardware.