Network Algorithmics, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9: Protocol processing

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.

—James Thorpe

Abstract

Having created a zero-copy implementation with minimal context switching—and there is strong evidence that modern implementations of network appliances have learned these lessons well—new bottlenecks invite scrutiny. There are a host of other protocol implementation tasks that can become new bottlenecks. This chapter deals briefly with some of the common remaining tasks: buffer management, checksums, sequence number bookkeeping, reassembly, and generic protocol processing. The importance of these protocol-processing “chores” may be increasing, for the following reasons. First, link speeds in the local network are already ...