IRLstack 3.0: High-Performance Windows Sockets

Abstract

With the ever-growing volume and speed of Internet traffic, network applications place higher demand on packet I/O rates. Although 1-Gbps and even 10-Gbps Ethernet are widely adopted, achieving wire rate with small packets remains hindered by bottlenecks inside the TCP/IP stack. Improvements have been made for Linux, but there is still limited work in Windows. To bridge this gap, we build a new generation of our network driver IRLstack and show that it can achieve 10 Gbps wire rate (i.e. 14.88 Mpps), for both send and receive, with zero CPU utilization. This compares favorably to the fastest Linux versions, which typically saturate one or more CPU cores and often fail to achieve this rate in both directions.