• udp
• stack
• performance
• protocol
• freebsd
• netmap

The networking stack on commodity operating system has performance limitations on very high speed interfaces (10 Gbit/s) and high packet rates. On the one side, the architecture of device drivers and protocol stacks limits the maximum achievable packet rates to about one million packets per second, despite the fact that peak packet rates on a 10 Gbit/s interface can be as high as 14.88 Mpps. Also, the solutions used to enhance performance and modularity (interrupt mitigation, interrupt threads, etc.) may introduce additional latencies of tens of microseconds in packet processing. These latencies may in turn negatively affects the performance of applications that rely on Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) over the network link.
In this work we explored the performance problems mentioned above, besides we studied how UDP and IP performance could be improved by streamlining the packet processing layer. As a result of our work we designed and implemented a simplified UDP socket library for the framework ‘‘Netmap’’, which considerably enhance network performances of such commodity operating systems compared with the standard library.