Isolating the performance impacts of network interface cards through microbenchmarks

Abstract

Many factors can prevent a Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC) from achieving line rate in a modern web server. In fact, the various commercially available NICs have different performance characteristics that lead to throughput differences for actual web servers. For example, Figure 1 shows the performance achieved by the thttpd web server for client traces extracted from the Rice University computer science department (CS), a NASA web site (NASA), and the 1998 soccer World Cup tournament (World Cup). The latter two traces are available from the Internet Traffic Archive (http://ita.ee.lbl.gov/). The server system tested includes an AMD Athlon 2600+ XP processor running the FreeBSD 4.7 operating system, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, a 64-bit/66 MHz PCI bus, and a single 40 GB IDE disk (none of the workloads are disk intensive). The tested systems differ only in their NIC, with the Intel Pro-1000/MT Server and Desktop, Alteon AceNIC with parallelized firmware [2], Netgear GA622T, 3Com 3C996B, and Alteon AceNIC with released firmware arranged from left to right. There are substantial performance differences across the NICs in the web environment, as the fastest NIC consistently achieves 40–60% more throughput than the slowest. A web server interacts with the network in two primary ways: receiving client HTTP requests and sending HTTP responses. Requests are typically quite small, on the order of 200 bytes of ASCII text, while responses vary from empty files to several hundred megabytes. Since web clients and servers communicate using TCP, the server must acknowledge requests, leading to minimum-sized (64-byte) Ethernet frames. Response data must be segmented and encapsulated in Ethernet frames, which allow up to 1460 bytes of TCP content in a maximum-sized (1518-byte) frame. Then, those segments are sent out according to TCP flow control policies based on the receipt of acknowledgments. A high-performance server NIC must thus support data volumes dominated by sends of large