How to Measure the Killer Microsecond
Mia Primorac, Edouard Bugnion, Katerina Argyraki · 2017
Datacenter-networking research requires tools to both generate traffic and accurately measure latency and throughput. While hardware-based tools have long existed commercially, they are primarily used to validate ASICs and lack flexibility, e.g., to study new protocols. They are also too expensive for academics. The recent development of kernel-bypass networking and advanced NIC features such as hardware timestamping have created new opportunities for accurate latency measurements. This paper compares these two approaches, and in particular whether commodity servers and NICs, when properly configured, can measure the latency distributions as precisely as specialized hardware.