A Benchmark Tool for Network I/O Management Architectures

Abstract

The performance of a network server is directly influenced by its network I/O management architecture, i.e., its network I/O multiplexing mechanism. Existing benchmark tools focus on the evaluation of high-level service performance of network servers that implement specific application-layer protocols or the evaluation of low-level communication performance of network paths. However, such tools are not suitable for performance evaluation of server architectures. In this study, we developed a benchmark tool for network I/O management architectures. We implemented five representative network I/O management mechanisms as modules: multi-process, multi-thread, select, poll, and epoll. This modularised implementation enabled quantitative and fair comparisons among them. Our experimental results on Linux 2.6 revealed that the select-based and poll-based servers had no performance advantage over the others and the multi-process and multi-thread servers achieved a high performance almost equal to that of the epoll-based server.