Paper, 2024.02

Comparison and analysis of Zero-copy based file transfer mechanisms

Copying file data into network sockets eats CPU time in cloud and streaming systems; this paper looks at how much Zero-copy helps. It compares the kernel paths of classic Linux read/write and the splice-based sendfile, and uses uftrace to time transfers at five file sizes (1KB to 64MB) along with the kernel functions involved, such as filemap_read. Joonho Seo is the first of seven authors and presented the work as a poster at the KICS Winter Conference 2024. Differences were small at 256KB and below but grew with file size, and at 64MB sendfile was 3.65 times faster than read/write.

Where

KICS Winter Conference 2024

My role

First author

Status

published

sendfile 3.65x faster than read/write for a 64MB transfer