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FlexPoll: adaptive event polling for network-intensive applications

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Abstract

In today’s data centers supporting Internet-scale computing and input/output (I/O) services, increasinglymore network-intensive applications are deployed on the network as a service. To this end, it is critical for the applications to quickly retrieve requests from the network and send their responses to the network. To facilitate this network function, operating system usually provides an event notification mechanism so that the applications (or the library) know if the network is ready to supply data for them to read or to receive data for them to write. As a widely used and representative notification mechanism, epoll in Linux provides a scalable and high-performance implementation by allowing applications to specifically indicate which connections and what events on them need to be watched.

As epoll has been used in some major systems, including key-value (KV) systems, such as Redis and Memcached, and web server systems such as NGINX, we have identified a substantial performance issue in its use. For the sake of efficiency, applications usually use epoll’s system calls to inform the kernel exactly of what events they are interested in and always keep the information up-to-date. However, in a system with demanding network traffic, such a rigid maintenance of the information is not necessary and the excess number of system calls for this purpose can substantially degrade the system’s performance. In this paper, we use Redis as an example to explore the issue. We propose a strategy of informing the kernel of the interest events in a manner adaptive to the current network load, so that the epoll system calls can be reduced and the events can be efficiently delivered. We have implemented an event-polling library, named as FlexPoll, purely in user-level without modifying any kernel code.

Our evaluation on Redis shows that the query throughput can be improved by up to 46.9% on micro-benchmarks, and even up to 67.8% on workloads emulating real-world access patterns. FlexPoll is a generic mechanism thus it can be adopted by other applications in a straightforward manner, such as NGINX and Memcached.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xingbo Wu, Xiang Long & Lei Wang

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  1. Xingbo Wu
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  2. Xiang Long
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  3. Lei Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lei Wang.

Additional information

Xingbo Wu received his BS in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Beihang University, China in 2009. He is pursuing PhD at Beihang University. His research interests include performance tuning in storage systems, operating systems and computer architecture.

Xiang Long received his BS degree in mathematics from Peking University, China in 1985, and received the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Beihang University, China in 1988 and 1994, respectively. He has been a professor at Beihang University since 1999. His research interests include parallel and distributed system, computer architecture, embedded system and multi-/many-core oriented operating system.

Lei Wang is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Beihang University, China. He received his BS (1991) in computer science from the Shenyang JianZhu University, China, his MS (1994) from Harbin Engineering University, China, and PhD (1998) from BeiHang University. His research interests include operating system, complex networks, and compiler.

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Wu, X., Long, X. & Wang, L. FlexPoll: adaptive event polling for network-intensive applications. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 532–542 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-3453-x

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