Beltway Buffers: Avoiding the OS Traffic Jam
Willem de Bruijn, Herbert Bos · 2008
Beltway buffers are operating system I/O paths optimised for high-throughput network applications. The key architectural feature of Beltway buffers is that all I/O takes place in long-lived, allocation-free, shared ringbuffers. Advantages of this design are (1) improved throughput through system-wide copy, context-switch and allocation avoidance and judicious use of the data cache, (2) transparent integration of peripheral hardware and (3) simplicity and familiarity due to comprehensive use of the POSIX file interface for accessing streams.