Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Leveraging bandwidth improvements to web servers through enhanced network interfaces

  • Published:
The Journal of Supercomputing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Markets nowadays demand applications that require high communication throughputs to reach their adequate levels of performance. Although the bandwidth of the network links has increased allowing multiple gigabits per second, taking advantage of these links accounts for a high communication overhead, and thus a lot of processor cycles are used for communication tasks, diminishing the processor cycles that remain available for the application.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance in web applications of a network interface that as it is distributed among the processors currently available in the node takes advantage of both the hardware (multiprocessor nodes and multicore architectures, as well as programmable network interface cards) and software elements present in the system, thus improving not only the effective communication throughputs and latencies, but also the capacity of the nodes to satisfy the requirements of the applications. Here, the usefulness of this distributed network interface to improve the performance of either static or dynamic web servers is shown. The ubiquity and the different computation/communication rates that can be found in web applications make the analysis of web servers interesting, as it could provide relevant conclusions about the efficiency of the different approaches to the design of high-performance network interfaces.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Apache web server. http://httpd.apache.org

  2. Benvenuti C (2005) Understanding Linux kernel internals. O’Reilly, Sebastopol

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bovet DP, Cesati M (2005) Understanding the Linux kernel. O’Reilly, Sebastopol

    Google Scholar 

  4. Brogioli M, Willman P, Rixner S (2006) Parallelization strategies for network interface firmware. In: Proc. of 4th workshop on optimization for DSP and embedded systems, ODES-4

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cascón P, Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Roja I (2011) Accelerating network applications by distributed interfaces on heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures. J Supercomput 58(3):302–313

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chakraborty S et al (2003) Performance evaluation of network processor architectures: combining simulation with analytical estimation. Comput Netw 41:641–645

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Competitive Comparison. Intel I/O acceleration technology vs. TCP offload engine. http://www.intel.com/technology/ioacceleration/316126.pdf

  8. de Bruijn W, Bos H (2008) Model-T: Rethinking the OS for terabits speeds. In: Workshop on high-speed networks (HSN2008), INFOCOM’2008

    Google Scholar 

  9. Foong A, Fung J, Newell D (2004) An in-depth analysis of the impact of processor affinity on network performance. In: Proceedings of the ICON, November 2004

    Google Scholar 

  10. GadelRab S (2007) 10-gigabit Ethernet connectivity for computer servers. IEEE MICRO 27(3):94–105

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hansen T, Mainkar V, Reeser P (2002) Performance comparison of dynamic web platforms. Comput Commun 26(8):888–898

    Google Scholar 

  12. http://www.chelsio.com/ (2007)

  13. http://www.windriver.com/products/simics/

  14. Jan H (2009) MiAMI: multi-core aware processor affinity for TCP/IP over multiple network interfaces”. In: 17th IEEE symposium on high performance interconnects, HOTI

    Google Scholar 

  15. Kim H-Y, Rixner S (2006) TCP offload through connection handoff. In: ACM Eurosys’06, pp 279–290

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kim H, Pai VS, Rixner S (2003) Exploiting task-level concurrency in a programmable network interface. In: Proc of the ACM PPoPP’03

    Google Scholar 

  17. Magnusson PS et al (2002) Simics: a full system simulation platform. Computer 35(2):50–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Mogul JC (2003) TCP offload is a dumb idea whose time has come. In: 9th workshop on hot topics in operating systems (HotOS IX)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Nahum EM, Yates DJ, Kurose JF, Towsley D (1994) Performance issues in parallelized network protocols. In: Proc of the operating systems design and implementation, pp 125–137

    Google Scholar 

  20. Narayanaswamy G, Balaji P, Feng W (2007) An analysis of 10-gigabit Ethernet protocol stacks in multicore environments. In: 15th IEEE symp on high-performance interconnects (HOTI’07), pp 109–116

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Prieto A (2006) Protocol offload evaluation using Simics. In: IEEE cluster computing, Barcelona, September, 2006

    Google Scholar 

  22. Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Prieto A (2008) Comparison of offloading and onloading strategies to improve network interfaces. In: 16th Euromicro international conference on parallel, distributed and network-based processing, PDP 2008, February 2008, Toulouse

    Google Scholar 

  23. Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Cascón P, Prieto A (2009) Protocol offload analysis by simulation. J Syst Archit 55:25–42

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Prieto A (2009) A new offloaded/onloaded network interface for high performance communication. In: 17th Euromicro international conference on parallel, distributed and network-based processing, PDP 2009, February 2008, Weimar

    Google Scholar 

  25. Ortiz A, Ortega J, Díaz AF, Prieto A (2009) Network interfaces for programmable NICs and multicore platforms. Comput Netw. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2009.09.11

    Google Scholar 

  26. Pacifici G, Segmuller W, Spreitzer M, Tantawi A (2008) CPU demand for web serving: measurement analysis and dynamic estimation. Perform Eval 65(6–7):531–553

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Papaefstathiou I. et al (2004) Network processors for future high-end systems and applications. IEEE MICRO 24(5):7–9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Ravi J, Yu Z, Shi W (2009) A survey on dynamic web content generation and delivery techniques. J Netw Comput Appl 32:943–960

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Reeser P, Hariharan R (2002) An analytic model of web servers in distributed computing environments. Telecommun Syst 21(2–4):283–299

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Regnier G et al (2004) TCP onloading for data center servers. Computer 37(11):48–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Salim J (2001) Beyond SoftNet. In: Proc 5th ann Linux showcase and conf. www.linuxshowcase.org/2001/full_papers/jamal/jamal.pdf

  32. Shalev L, Marhervaks V, Machulsky Z, Biran G, Satran J, Ben-Yehuda M, Shimony I (2006) Loosely coupled TCP acceleration architecture. In: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE symposium on high-performance interconnects (HOTI)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Shivam P, Chase JS (2003) On the elusive benefits of protocol offload. In: SIGCOMM’03 workshop on network-I/O convergence: experience, lessons, implications (NICELI), August, 2003

    Google Scholar 

  34. Thiele L et al (2002) Design space exploration of network processor architectures. In: Proc 1st workshop on network processors (8th int. symp. on high performance computer architecture), February, 2002

    Google Scholar 

  35. Titchkosky L, Arlitt M, Williamson C (2003) Performance benchmarking of dynamic web technologies. In: 11th IEEE international symposium on modeling, analysis, and simulation of computer and telecommunications systems (MASCOTS’03), vol 20, p 250

    Google Scholar 

  36. Vaidyanathan K, Panda DK Benefits of I/O acceleration technology (I/OAT) in clusters. Technical report, Ohio State Univ (OSU_CISRC-2/07-TR13)

  37. Williamson C, Simmonds R, Arlitt M (2002) A case study of web server benchmarking using parallel WAN emulation. Perform Eval 49(1–4):111–127

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  38. Wu W, Crawford M, Bowden M (2007) The performance analysis of Linux networking—packet receiving. Comput Commun 30(5):1044–1057

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Yeager N, McGrath R (1996) Web server technology: the advanced guide for world wide web information providers. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco

    MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by projects TIN2007-60587 and TIN2012-32039. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ingeniería de Comunicaciones, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Andrés Ortiz

  2. Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    Julio Ortega, Antonio F. Díaz & Mancia Anguita

Authors
  1. Andrés Ortiz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Julio Ortega
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Antonio F. Díaz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Mancia Anguita
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio F. Díaz.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ortiz, A., Ortega, J., Díaz, A.F. et al. Leveraging bandwidth improvements to web servers through enhanced network interfaces. J Supercomput 65, 1020–1036 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0841-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0841-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation