Impact of bursty traffic on the performance of popular interrupt handling schemes for gigabit-network hosts

Abstract

With the current wide deployment of Gigabit Ethernet technology, the network performance bottleneck has shifted from the network to the end hosts and servers. System performance of Gigabit network hosts can severely be degraded due to interrupt overhead caused by heavy incoming traffic. To eliminate interrupt overhead, different solutions have been proposed in the literature. The most popular interrupt-handling schemes primarily include interrupt coalescing, polling, and interrupt disabling and enabling of interrupts. When studying the performance of these interrupt handling schemes, the network traffic is often assumed to be Poisson which can be invalid. This thesis presents a study of the impact of bursty traffic on the performance of these schemes in terms of throughput, system latency, packet loss, and CPU utilization. The study is conducted using discrete-event simulation. The simulation results are compared with those reported in the previous work done using the Poisson traffic. In addition, the thesis studies a novel hybrid scheme of interrupt Disabling-Enabling and pure polling. The performance of the hybrid scheme is compared and its design and implementation aspects are addressed.