Packet Order Matters! Improving Application Performance by Deliberately Delaying PacketsShow others and affiliations
2022 (English)In: Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2022, USENIX - The Advanced Computing Systems Association, 2022, p. 807-827Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Data centers increasingly deploy commodity servers with high-speed network interfaces to enable low-latency communication. However, achieving low latency at high data rates crucially depends on how the incoming traffic interacts with the system's caches. When packets that need to be processed in the same way are consecutive, i.e., exhibit high temporal and spatial locality, caches deliver great benefits.
In this paper, we systematically study the impact of temporal and spatial traffic locality on the performance of commodity servers equipped with high-speed network interfaces. Our results show that (i) the performance of a variety of widely deployed applications degrades substantially with even the slightest lack of traffic locality, and (ii) a traffic trace from our organization reveals poor traffic locality as networking protocols, drivers, and the underlying switching/routing fabric spread packets out in time (reducing locality). To address these issues, we built Reframer, a software solution that deliberately delays packets and reorders them to increase traffic locality. Despite introducing μs-scale delays of some packets, we show that Reframer increases the throughput of a network service chain by up to 84% and reduces the flow completion time of a web server by 11% while improving its throughput by 20%.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
USENIX - The Advanced Computing Systems Association, 2022. p. 807-827
Keywords [en]
packet ordering, spatial and temporal locality, packet scheduling, batch processing, high-speed networking
National Category
Communication Systems
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-304656ISI: 000876762200046Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85140983450OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-304656DiVA, id: diva2:1609944
Conference
19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), APR 04-06, 2022, Renton, WA
Projects
ULTRAWASPTime-Critical Clouds
Funder
Swedish Foundation for Strategic ResearchKnut and Alice Wallenberg FoundationEU, European Research Council
Note
QC 20230619
2021-11-092021-11-092023-06-19Bibliographically approved