Application-Agnostic Offloading of Packet Processing

Abstract

As network speed increases, servers struggle to serve all requests directed at them. This challenge is rooted in a partitioned data path where the split between the kernel space networking stack and user space applications induces overheads. To address this challenge, we propose Santa, a new architecture to optimize the data path by enabling server applications to partially offload packet processing to a generic rule processor. We exemplify Santa by showing how it can drastically accelerate kernel-based packet processing - a currently neglected domain. Our evaluation of a broad class of applications, namely DNS, Memcached, and HTTP, highlights that Santa can substantially improve the server performance by a factor of 5.5, 2.1, and 2.5, respectively.