COSCUP 2023

In the past few decades, event-driven architecture has become a common design paradigm for developing high-performance network servers, as it can efficiently handle concurrent requests using I/O multiplexing. However, the mitigation mechanisms for microarchitectural vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown have increased the overhead of already system call-intensive situations. Moreover, the synchronous execution blocking feature of traditional system calls makes it difficult to leverage advanced multi-core processors. To address these limitations and identify performance bottlenecks, this session will gradually analyze the evolution of the Linux I/O model and clarify the runtime of applications such as Redis and KeyDB. As a way to overcome these limitations, this session will also demonstrate the implementation of a specialized core module that improves the performance of event-driven network servers through I/O offloading. Our approach does not sacrifice high power consumption or security like kernel bypass techniques in exchange for high-performance throughput and latency. Additionally, we have conducted multiple experiments to compare our method with native systems, and the results show that our method improves bandwidth, latency, and power consumption without requiring the redesign or reimplementation of the entire application.