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Abstract : |
Large-scale network services such as data delivery often incorporate new functions by interposing intermediaries on the network. Examples of forwarding intermediaries include firewalls, content routers, protocol converters, caching proxies, and multicast servers. With the move toward network storage, even static Web servers act as intermediaries to forward data from storage to clients. This paper presents the design, implementation, and measured performance of payload caching, a technique for improving performance of host-based intermediaries. The approach is for the NIC to cache portions of the incoming packet stream, so the system may forward data directly from the cache. We prototyped payload caching in a programmable high-speed network adapter and a FreeBSD kernel with support for zero-copy networking. Experiments with TCP/IP traffic flows shows that payload caching can improve forwarding performance by up to 60 % in realistic scenarios., |
