From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Oct 12 8:52:49 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from cs.rice.edu (cs.rice.edu [128.42.1.30]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 91421151B5; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 08:52:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from aron@cs.rice.edu) Received: (from aron@localhost) by cs.rice.edu (8.9.0/8.9.0) id KAA16014; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:52:38 -0500 (CDT) From: Mohit Aron Message-Id: <199910121552.KAA16014@cs.rice.edu> Subject: paper on fine-grained OS timers To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org, tech-net@netbsd.org Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:52:38 -0500 (CDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I'd like to tell the BSD community about my paper entitled "Soft timers: efficient microsecond software timer support for network processing" that's going to appear in SOSP 1999. The abstract for the paper is attached below. The gzip'd postcript for the paper can be downloaded from: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~aron/papers/soft-timers.ps.gz Thanks, - Mohit Abstract: This paper proposes and evaluates soft timers, a new operating system facility that allows the efficient scheduling of software events at a granularity down to tens of microseconds. Soft timers can be used to avoid interrupts and reduce context switches associated with network processing without sacrificing low communication delays. More specifically, soft timers enable transport protocols like TCP to efficiently perform rate-based clocking of packet transmissions. Experiments show that rate-based clocking can improve HTTP response time over connections with high bandwidth-delay products by up to 89% and that soft timers allow a server to employ rate-based clocking with little CPU overhead (2--6%) at high aggregate bandwidths. Soft timers can also be used to perform network polling, which eliminates network interrupts and increases the memory access locality of the network subsystem without sacrificing delay. Experiments show that this technique can improve the throughput of a Web server by up to 25%. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message