Repository logo
 

Disk|Crypt|Net: rethinking the stack for high-performance video streaming

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Marinos, Ilias 
Watson, Robert NM 
Handley, Mark 
Stewart, Randall R 

Abstract

Conventional operating systems used for video streaming employ an in-memory disk buffer cache to mask the high latency and low throughput of disks. However, data from Netflix servers show that this cache has a low hit rate, so does little to improve throughput. Latency is not the problem it once was either, due to PCIe-attached flash storage. With memory bandwidth increasingly becoming a bot- tleneck for video servers, especially when end-to-end encryption is considered, we revisit the interaction between storage and network- ing for video streaming servers in pursuit of higher performance. We show how to build high-performance userspace network ser- vices that saturate existing hardware while serving data directly from disks, with no need for a traditional disk buffer cache. Employing netmap, and developing a new diskmap service, which provides safe high-performance userspace direct I/O access to NVMe devices, we amortize system overheads by utilizing efficient batching of outstand- ing I/O requests, process-to completion, and zerocopy operation. We demonstrate how a buffer-cache-free design is not only practical, but required in order to achieve efficient use of memory bandwidth on contemporary microarchitectures. Minimizing latency between DMA and CPU access by integrating storage and TCP control loops allows many operations to access only the last-level cache rather than bottle-necking on memory bandwidth. We illustrate the power of this design by building Atlas, a video streaming web server that outperforms state-of-the-art configurations, and achieves ~72Gbps of plaintext or encrypted network traffic using a fraction of the available CPU cores on commodity hardware.

Description

Keywords

Network stacks, Storage stacks, Network Performance

Journal Title

SIGCOMM '17: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2017 CONFERENCE OF THE ACM SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON DATA COMMUNICATION

Conference Name

SIGCOMM '17: ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Conference

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM
Sponsorship
This work was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship, and a NetApp Faculty Fellowship.