Assessing Soft- and Hardware Bottlenecks in PC-based Packet Forwarding Systems

摘要

Due to grown capabilities of commodity hardware for packet processing and the high flexibility of software, the use of those systems as alternatives to expensive dedicated networking devices has gained momentum. However, the performance of such PC-based software systems is still low when compared to specialized hardware. In this paper, we analyze the performance of several packet forwarding systems and identify bottlenecks by using profiling techniques. We show that the packet IO in the operating system's network stack is a significant bottleneck and that a six-fold performance increase can be achieved with user space networking frameworks like Intel DPDK.