Modularity and efficiency in protocol implementation
RFC 817
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(July 1982; No errata)
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RFC: 817
MODULARITY AND EFFICIENCY IN PROTOCOL IMPLEMENTATION
David D. Clark
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Computer Systems and Communications Group
July, 1982
1. Introduction
Many protocol implementers have made the unpleasant discovery that
their packages do not run quite as fast as they had hoped. The blame
for this widely observed problem has been attributed to a variety of
causes, ranging from details in the design of the protocol to the
underlying structure of the host operating system. This RFC will
discuss some of the commonly encountered reasons why protocol
implementations seem to run slowly.
Experience suggests that one of the most important factors in
determining the performance of an implementation is the manner in which
that implementation is modularized and integrated into the host
operating system. For this reason, it is useful to discuss the question
of how an implementation is structured at the same time that we consider
how it will perform. In fact, this RFC will argue that modularity is
one of the chief villains in attempting to obtain good performance, so
that the designer is faced with a delicate and inevitable tradeoff
between good structure and good performance. Further, the single factor
which most strongly determines how well this conflict can be resolved is
not the protocol but the operating system.
2
2. Efficiency Considerations
There are many aspects to efficiency. One aspect is sending data
at minimum transmission cost, which is a critical aspect of common
carrier communications, if not in local area network communications.
Another aspect is sending data at a high rate, which may not be possible
at all if the net is very slow, but which may be the one central design
constraint when taking advantage of a local net with high raw bandwidth.
The final consideration is doing the above with minimum expenditure of
computer resources. This last may be necessary to achieve high speed,
but in the case of the slow net may be important only in that the
resources used up, for example cpu cycles, are costly or otherwise
needed. It is worth pointing out that these different goals often
conflict; for example it is often possible to trade off efficient use of
the computer against efficient use of the network. Thus, there may be
no such thing as a successful general purpose protocol implementation.
The simplest measure of performance is throughput, measured in bits
per second. It is worth doing a few simple computations in order to get
a feeling for the magnitude of the problems involved. Assume that data
is being sent from one machine to another in packets of 576 bytes, the
maximum generally acceptable internet packet size. Allowing for header
overhead, this packet size permits 4288 bits in each packet. If a
useful throughput of 10,000 bits per second is desired, then a data
bearing packet must leave the sending host about every 430 milliseconds,
a little over two per second. This is clearly not difficult to achieve.
However, if one wishes to achieve 100 kilobits per second throughput,
3
the packet must leave the host every 43 milliseconds, and to achieve one
megabit per second, which is not at all unreasonable on a high-speed
local net, the packets must be spaced no more than 4.3 milliseconds.
These latter numbers are a slightly more alarming goal for which to
set one's sights. Many operating systems take a substantial fraction of
a millisecond just to service an interrupt. If the protocol has been
structured as a process, it is necessary to go through a process
scheduling before the protocol code can even begin to run. If any piece
of a protocol package or its data must be fetched from disk, real time
delays of between 30 to 100 milliseconds can be expected. If the
protocol must compete for cpu resources with other processes of the
system, it may be necessary to wait a scheduling quantum before the
protocol can run. Many systems have a scheduling quantum of 100
milliseconds or more. Considering these sorts of numbers, it becomes
immediately clear that the protocol must be fitted into the operating
system in a thorough and effective manner if any like reasonable
throughput is to be achieved.
There is one obvious conclusion immediately suggested by even this
simple analysis. Except in very special circumstances, when many
packets are being processed at once, the cost of processing a packet is
dominated by factors, such as cpu scheduling, which are independent of
the packet size. This suggests two general rules which any
implementation ought to obey. First, send data in large packets.
Obviously, if processing time per packet is a constant, then throughput
will be directly proportional to the packet size. Second, never send an
4
unneeded packet. Unneeded packets use up just as many resources as a
packet full of data, but perform no useful function. RFC 813, "Window
and Acknowledgement Strategy in TCP", discusses one aspect of reducing
the number of packets sent per useful data byte. This document will
mention other attacks on the same problem.
The above analysis suggests that there are two main parts to the
problem of achieving good protocol performance. The first has to do
with how the protocol implementation is integrated into the host
operating system. The second has to do with how the protocol package
itself is organized internally. This document will consider each of
these topics in turn.
3. The Protocol vs. the Operating System
There are normally three reasonable ways in which to add a protocol
to an operating system. The protocol can be in a process that is
provided by the operating system, or it can be part of the kernel of the
operating system itself, or it can be put in a separate communications
processor or front end machine. This decision is strongly influenced by
details of hardware architecture and operating system design; each of
these three approaches has its own advantages and disadvantages.
The "process" is the abstraction which most operating systems use
to provide the execution environment for user programs. A very simple
path for implementing a protocol is to obtain a process from the
operating system and implement the protocol to run in it.
Superficially, this approach has a number of advantages. Since
5
modifications to the kernel are not required, the job can be done by
someone who is not an expert in the kernel structure. Since it is often
impossible to find somebody who is experienced both in the structure of
the operating system and the structure of the protocol, this path, from
a management point of view, is often extremely appealing. Unfortunately,
putting a protocol in a process has a number of disadvantages, related
to both structure and performance. First, as was discussed above,
process scheduling can be a significant source of real-time delay.
There is not only the actual cost of going through the scheduler, but
the problem that the operating system may not have the right sort of
priority tools to bring the process into execution quickly whenever
there is work to be done.
Structurally, the difficulty with putting a protocol in a process
is that the protocol may be providing services, for example support of
data streams, which are normally obtained by going to special kernel
entry points. Depending on the generality of the operating system, it
may be impossible to take a program which is accustomed to reading
through a kernel entry point, and redirect it so it is reading the data
from a process. The most extreme example of this problem occurs when
implementing server telnet. In almost all systems, the device handler
for the locally attached teletypes is located inside the kernel, and
programs read and write from their teletype by making kernel calls. If
server telnet is implemented in a process, it is then necessary to take
the data streams provided by server telnet and somehow get them back
down inside the kernel so that they mimic the interface provided by
local teletypes. It is usually the case that special kernel
6
modification is necessary to achieve this structure, which somewhat
defeats the benefit of having removed the protocol from the kernel in
the first place.
Clearly, then, there are advantages to putting the protocol package
in the kernel. Structurally, it is reasonable to view the network as a
device, and device drivers are traditionally contained in the kernel.
Presumably, the problems associated with process scheduling can be
sidesteped, at least to a certain extent, by placing the code inside the
kernel. And it is obviously easier to make the server telnet channels
mimic the local teletype channels if they are both realized in the same
level in the kernel.
However, implementation of protocols in the kernel has its own set
of pitfalls. First, network protocols have a characteristic which is
shared by almost no other device: they require rather complex actions
to be performed as a result of a timeout. The problem with this
requirement is that the kernel often has no facility by which a program
can be brought into execution as a result of the timer event. What is
really needed, of course, is a special sort of process inside the
kernel. Most systems lack this mechanism. Failing that, the only
execution mechanism available is to run at interrupt time.
There are substantial drawbacks to implementing a protocol to run
at interrupt time. First, the actions performed may be somewhat complex
and time consuming, compared to the maximum amount of time that the
operating system is prepared to spend servicing an interrupt. Problems
can arise if interrupts are masked for too long. This is particularly
7
bad when running as a result of a clock interrupt, which can imply that
the clock interrupt is masked. Second, the environment provided by an
interrupt handler is usually extremely primitive compared to the
environment of a process. There are usually a variety of system
facilities which are unavailable while running in an interrupt handler.
The most important of these is the ability to suspend execution pending
the arrival of some event or message. It is a cardinal rule of almost
every known operating system that one must not invoke the scheduler
while running in an interrupt handler. Thus, the programmer who is
forced to implement all or part of his protocol package as an interrupt
handler must be the best sort of expert in the operating system
involved, and must be prepared for development sessions filled with
obscure bugs which crash not just the protocol package but the entire
operating system.
A final problem with processing at interrupt time is that the
system scheduler has no control over the percentage of system time used
by the protocol handler. If a large number of packets arrive, from a
foreign host that is either malfunctioning or fast, all of the time may
be spent in the interrupt handler, effectively killing the system.
There are other problems associated with putting protocols into an
operating system kernel. The simplest problem often encountered is that
the kernel address space is simply too small to hold the piece of code
in question. This is a rather artificial sort of problem, but it is a
severe problem none the less in many machines. It is an appallingly
unpleasant experience to do an implementation with the knowledge that
8
for every byte of new feature put in one must find some other byte of
old feature to throw out. It is hopeless to expect an effective and
general implementation under this kind of constraint. Another problem
is that the protocol package, once it is thoroughly entwined in the
operating system, may need to be redone every time the operating system
changes. If the protocol and the operating system are not maintained by
the same group, this makes maintenance of the protocol package a
perpetual headache.
The third option for protocol implementation is to take the
protocol package and move it outside the machine entirely, on to a
separate processor dedicated to this kind of task. Such a machine is
often described as a communications processor or a front-end processor.
There are several advantages to this approach. First, the operating
system on the communications processor can be tailored for precisely
this kind of task. This makes the job of implementation much easier.
Second, one does not need to redo the task for every machine to which
the protocol is to be added. It may be possible to reuse the same
front-end machine on different host computers. Since the task need not
be done as many times, one might hope that more attention could be paid
to doing it right. Given a careful implementation in an environment
which is optimized for this kind of task, the resulting package should
turn out to be very efficient. Unfortunately, there are also problems
with this approach. There is, of course, a financial problem associated
with buying an additional computer. In many cases, this is not a
problem at all since the cost is negligible compared to what the
programmer would cost to do the job in the mainframe itself. More
9
fundamentally, the communications processor approach does not completely
sidestep any of the problems raised above. The reason is that the
communications processor, since it is a separate machine, must be
attached to the mainframe by some mechanism. Whatever that mechanism,
code is required in the mainframe to deal with it. It can be argued
that the program to deal with the communications processor is simpler
than the program to implement the entire protocol package. Even if that
is so, the communications processor interface package is still a
protocol in nature, with all of the same structural problems. Thus, all
of the issues raised above must still be faced. In addition to those
problems, there are some other, more subtle problems associated with an
outboard implementation of a protocol. We will return to these problems
later.
There is a way of attaching a communications processor to a
mainframe host which sidesteps all of the mainframe implementation
problems, which is to use some preexisting interface on the host machine
as the port by which a communications processor is attached. This
strategy is often used as a last stage of desperation when the software
on the host computer is so intractable that it cannot be changed in any
way. Unfortunately, it is almost inevitably the case that all of the
available interfaces are totally unsuitable for this purpose, so the
result is unsatisfactory at best. The most common way in which this
form of attachment occurs is when a network connection is being used to
mimic local teletypes. In this case, the front-end processor can be
attached to the mainframe by simply providing a number of wires out of
the front-end processor, each corresponding to a connection, which are
10
plugged into teletype ports on the mainframe computer. (Because of the
appearance of the physical configuration which results from this
arrangement, Michael Padlipsky has described this as the "milking
machine" approach to computer networking.) This strategy solves the
immediate problem of providing remote access to a host, but it is
extremely inflexible. The channels being provided to the host are
restricted by the host software to one purpose only, remote login. It
is impossible to use them for any other purpose, such as file transfer
or sending mail, so the host is integrated into the network environment
in an extremely limited and inflexible manner. If this is the best that
can be done, then it should be tolerated. Otherwise, implementors
should be strongly encouraged to take a more flexible approach.
4. Protocol Layering
The previous discussion suggested that there was a decision to be
made as to where a protocol ought to be implemented. In fact, the
decision is much more complicated than that, for the goal is not to
implement a single protocol, but to implement a whole family of protocol
layers, starting with a device driver or local network driver at the
bottom, then IP and TCP, and eventually reaching the application
specific protocol, such as Telnet, FTP and SMTP on the top. Clearly,
the bottommost of these layers is somewhere within the kernel, since the
physical device driver for the net is almost inevitably located there.
Equally clearly, the top layers of this package, which provide the user
his ability to perform the remote login function or to send mail, are
not entirely contained within the kernel. Thus, the question is not
11
whether the protocol family shall be inside or outside the kernel, but
how it shall be sliced in two between that part inside and that part
outside.
Since protocols come nicely layered, an obvious proposal is that
one of the layer interfaces should be the point at which the inside and
outside components are sliced apart. Most systems have been implemented
in this way, and many have been made to work quite effectively. One
obvious place to slice is at the upper interface of TCP. Since TCP
provides a bidirectional byte stream, which is somewhat similar to the
I/O facility provided by most operating systems, it is possible to make
the interface to TCP almost mimic the interface to other existing
devices. Except in the matter of opening a connection, and dealing with
peculiar failures, the software using TCP need not know that it is a
network connection, rather than a local I/O stream that is providing the
communications function. This approach does put TCP inside the kernel,
which raises all the problems addressed above. It also raises the
problem that the interface to the IP layer can, if the programmer is not
careful, become excessively buried inside the kernel. It must be
remembered that things other than TCP are expected to run on top of IP.
The IP interface must be made accessible, even if TCP sits on top of it
inside the kernel.
Another obvious place to slice is above Telnet. The advantage of
slicing above Telnet is that it solves the problem of having remote
login channels emulate local teletype channels. The disadvantage of
putting Telnet into the kernel is that the amount of code which has now
12
been included there is getting remarkably large. In some early
implementations, the size of the network package, when one includes
protocols at the level of Telnet, rivals the size of the rest of the
supervisor. This leads to vague feelings that all is not right.
Any attempt to slice through a lower layer boundary, for example
between internet and TCP, reveals one fundamental problem. The TCP
layer, as well as the IP layer, performs a demultiplexing function on
incoming datagrams. Until the TCP header has been examined, it is not
possible to know for which user the packet is ultimately destined.
Therefore, if TCP, as a whole, is moved outside the kernel, it is
necessary to create one separate process called the TCP process, which
performs the TCP multiplexing function, and probably all of the rest of
TCP processing as well. This means that incoming data destined for a
user process involves not just a scheduling of the user process, but
scheduling the TCP process first.
This suggests an alternative structuring strategy which slices
through the protocols, not along an established layer boundary, but
along a functional boundary having to do with demultiplexing. In this
approach, certain parts of IP and certain parts of TCP are placed in the
kernel. The amount of code placed there is sufficient so that when an
incoming datagram arrives, it is possible to know for which process that
datagram is ultimately destined. The datagram is then routed directly
to the final process, where additional IP and TCP processing is
performed on it. This removes from the kernel any requirement for timer
based actions, since they can be done by the process provided by the
13
user. This structure has the additional advantage of reducing the
amount of code required in the kernel, so that it is suitable for
systems where kernel space is at a premium. The RFC 814, titled "Names,
Addresses, Ports, and Routes," discusses this rather orthogonal slicing
strategy in more detail.
A related discussion of protocol layering and multiplexing can be
found in Cohen and Postel [1].
5. Breaking Down the Barriers
In fact, the implementor should be sensitive to the possibility of
even more peculiar slicing strategies in dividing up the various
protocol layers between the kernel and the one or more user processes.
The result of the strategy proposed above was that part of TCP should
execute in the process of the user. In other words, instead of having
one TCP process for the system, there is one TCP process per connection.
Given this architecture, it is not longer necessary to imagine that all
of the TCPs are identical. One TCP could be optimized for high
throughput applications, such as file transfer. Another TCP could be
optimized for small low delay applications such as Telnet. In fact, it
would be possible to produce a TCP which was somewhat integrated with
the Telnet or FTP on top of it. Such an integration is extremely
important, for it can lead to a kind of efficiency which more
traditional structures are incapable of producing. Earlier, this paper
pointed out that one of the important rules to achieving efficiency was
to send the minimum number of packets for a given amount of data. The
idea of protocol layering interacts very strongly (and poorly) with this
14
goal, because independent layers have independent ideas about when
packets should be sent, and unless these layers can somehow be brought
into cooperation, additional packets will flow. The best example of
this is the operation of server telnet in a character at a time remote
echo mode on top of TCP. When a packet containing a character arrives
at a server host, each layer has a different response to that packet.
TCP has an obligation to acknowledge the packet. Either server telnet
or the application layer above has an obligation to echo the character
received in the packet. If the character is a Telnet control sequence,
then Telnet has additional actions which it must perform in response to
the packet. The result of this, in most implementations, is that
several packets are sent back in response to the one arriving packet.
Combining all of these return messages into one packet is important for
several reasons. First, of course, it reduces the number of packets
being sent over the net, which directly reduces the charges incurred for
many common carrier tariff structures. Second, it reduces the number of
scheduling actions which will occur inside both hosts, which, as was
discussed above, is extremely important in improving throughput.
The way to achieve this goal of packet sharing is to break down the
barrier between the layers of the protocols, in a very restrained and
careful manner, so that a limited amount of information can leak across
the barrier to enable one layer to optimize its behavior with respect to
the desires of the layers above and below it. For example, it would
represent an improvement if TCP, when it received a packet, could ask
the layer above whether or not it would be worth pausing for a few
milliseconds before sending an acknowledgement in order to see if the
15
upper layer would have any outgoing data to send. Dallying before
sending the acknowledgement produces precisely the right sort of
optimization if the client of TCP is server Telnet. However, dallying
before sending an acknowledgement is absolutely unacceptable if TCP is
being used for file transfer, for in file transfer there is almost never
data flowing in the reverse direction, and the delay in sending the
acknowledgement probably translates directly into a delay in obtaining
the next packets. Thus, TCP must know a little about the layers above
it to adjust its performance as needed.
It would be possible to imagine a general purpose TCP which was
equipped with all sorts of special mechanisms by which it would query
the layer above and modify its behavior accordingly. In the structures
suggested above, in which there is not one but several TCPs, the TCP can
simply be modified so that it produces the correct behavior as a matter
of course. This structure has the disadvantage that there will be
several implementations of TCP existing on a single machine, which can
mean more maintenance headaches if a problem is found where TCP needs to
be changed. However, it is probably the case that each of the TCPs will
be substantially simpler than the general purpose TCP which would
otherwise have been built. There are some experimental projects
currently under way which suggest that this approach may make designing
of a TCP, or almost any other layer, substantially easier, so that the
total effort involved in bringing up a complete package is actually less
if this approach is followed. This approach is by no means generally
accepted, but deserves some consideration.
16
The general conclusion to be drawn from this sort of consideration
is that a layer boundary has both a benefit and a penalty. A visible
layer boundary, with a well specified interface, provides a form of
isolation between two layers which allows one to be changed with the
confidence that the other one will not stop working as a result.
However, a firm layer boundary almost inevitably leads to inefficient
operation. This can easily be seen by analogy with other aspects of
operating systems. Consider, for example, file systems. A typical
operating system provides a file system, which is a highly abstracted
representation of a disk. The interface is highly formalized, and
presumed to be highly stable. This makes it very easy for naive users
to have access to disks without having to write a great deal of
software. The existence of a file system is clearly beneficial. On the
other hand, it is clear that the restricted interface to a file system
almost inevitably leads to inefficiency. If the interface is organized
as a sequential read and write of bytes, then there will be people who
wish to do high throughput transfers who cannot achieve their goal. If
the interface is a virtual memory interface, then other users will
regret the necessity of building a byte stream interface on top of the
memory mapped file. The most objectionable inefficiency results when a
highly sophisticated package, such as a data base management package,
must be built on top of an existing operating system. Almost
inevitably, the implementors of the database system attempt to reject
the file system and obtain direct access to the disks. They have
sacrificed modularity for efficiency.
The same conflict appears in networking, in a rather extreme form.
17
The concept of a protocol is still unknown and frightening to most naive
programmers. The idea that they might have to implement a protocol, or
even part of a protocol, as part of some application package, is a
dreadful thought. And thus there is great pressure to hide the function
of the net behind a very hard barrier. On the other hand, the kind of
inefficiency which results from this is a particularly undesirable sort
of inefficiency, for it shows up, among other things, in increasing the
cost of the communications resource used up to achieve the application
goal. In cases where one must pay for one's communications costs, they
usually turn out to be the dominant cost within the system. Thus, doing
an excessively good job of packaging up the protocols in an inflexible
manner has a direct impact on increasing the cost of the critical
resource within the system. This is a dilemma which will probably only
be solved when programmers become somewhat less alarmed about protocols,
so that they are willing to weave a certain amount of protocol structure
into their application program, much as application programs today weave
parts of database management systems into the structure of their
application program.
An extreme example of putting the protocol package behind a firm
layer boundary occurs when the protocol package is relegated to a front-
end processor. In this case the interface to the protocol is some other
protocol. It is difficult to imagine how to build close cooperation
between layers when they are that far separated. Realistically, one of
the prices which must be associated with an implementation so physically
modularized is that the performance will suffer as a result. Of course,
a separate processor for protocols could be very closely integrated into
18
the mainframe architecture, with interprocessor co-ordination signals,
shared memory, and similar features. Such a physical modularity might
work very well, but there is little documented experience with this
closely coupled architecture for protocol support.
6. Efficiency of Protocol Processing
To this point, this document has considered how a protocol package
should be broken into modules, and how those modules should be
distributed between free standing machines, the operating system kernel,
and one or more user processes. It is now time to consider the other
half of the efficiency question, which is what can be done to speed the
execution of those programs that actually implement the protocols. We
will make some specific observations about TCP and IP, and then conclude
with a few generalities.
IP is a simple protocol, especially with respect to the processing
of normal packets, so it should be easy to get it to perform
efficiently. The only area of any complexity related to actual packet
processing has to do with fragmentation and reassembly. The reader is
referred to RFC 815, titled "IP Datagram Reassembly Algorithms", for
specific consideration of this point.
Most costs in the IP layer come from table look up functions, as
opposed to packet processing functions. An outgoing packet requires two
translation functions to be performed. The internet address must be
translated to a target gateway, and a gateway address must be translated
to a local network number (if the host is attached to more than one
19
network). It is easy to build a simple implementation of these table
look up functions that in fact performs very poorly. The programmer
should keep in mind that there may be as many as a thousand network
numbers in a typical configuration. Linear searching of a thousand
entry table on every packet is extremely unsuitable. In fact, it may be
worth asking TCP to cache a hint for each connection, which can be
handed down to IP each time a packet is sent, to try to avoid the
overhead of a table look up.
TCP is a more complex protocol, and presents many more
opportunities for getting things wrong. There is one area which is
generally accepted as causing noticeable and substantial overhead as
part of TCP processing. This is computation of the checksum. It would
be nice if this cost could be avoided somehow, but the idea of an end-
to-end checksum is absolutely central to the functioning of TCP. No
host implementor should think of omitting the validation of a checksum
on incoming data.
Various clever tricks have been used to try to minimize the cost of
computing the checksum. If it is possible to add additional microcoded
instructions to the machine, a checksum instruction is the most obvious
candidate. Since computing the checksum involves picking up every byte
of the segment and examining it, it is possible to combine the operation
of computing the checksum with the operation of copying the segment from
one location to another. Since a number of data copies are probably
already required as part of the processing structure, this kind of
sharing might conceivably pay off if it didn't cause too much trouble to
20
the modularity of the program. Finally, computation of the checksum
seems to be one place where careful attention to the details of the
algorithm used can make a drastic difference in the throughput of the
program. The Multics system provides one of the best case studies of
this, since Multics is about as poorly organized to perform this
function as any machine implementing TCP. Multics is a 36-bit word
machine, with four 9-bit bytes per word. The eight-bit bytes of a TCP
segment are laid down packed in memory, ignoring word boundaries. This
means that when it is necessary to pick up the data as a set of 16-bit
units for the purpose of adding them to compute checksums, horrible
masking and shifting is required for each 16-bit value. An early
version of a program using this strategy required 6 milliseconds to
checksum a 576-byte segment. Obviously, at this point, checksum
computation was becoming the central bottleneck to throughput. A more
careful recoding of this algorithm reduced the checksum processing time
to less than one millisecond. The strategy used was extremely dirty.
It involved adding up carefully selected words of the area in which the
data lay, knowing that for those particular words, the 16-bit values
were properly aligned inside the words. Only after the addition had
been done were the various sums shifted, and finally added to produce
the eventual checksum. This kind of highly specialized programming is
probably not acceptable if used everywhere within an operating system.
It is clearly appropriate for one highly localized function which can be
clearly identified as an extreme performance bottleneck.
Another area of TCP processing which may cause performance problems
is the overhead of examining all of the possible flags and options which
21
occur in each incoming packet. One paper, by Bunch and Day [2], asserts
that the overhead of packet header processing is actually an important
limiting factor in throughput computation. Not all measurement
experiments have tended to support this result. To whatever extent it
is true, however, there is an obvious strategy which the implementor
ought to use in designing his program. He should build his program to
optimize the expected case. It is easy, especially when first designing
a program, to pay equal attention to all of the possible outcomes of
every test. In practice, however, few of these will ever happen. A TCP
should be built on the assumption that the next packet to arrive will
have absolutely nothing special about it, and will be the next one
expected in the sequence space. One or two tests are sufficient to
determine that the expected set of control flags are on. (The ACK flag
should be on; the Push flag may or may not be on. No other flags should
be on.) One test is sufficient to determine that the sequence number of
the incoming packet is one greater than the last sequence number
received. In almost every case, that will be the actual result. Again,
using the Multics system as an example, failure to optimize the case of
receiving the expected sequence number had a detectable effect on the
performance of the system. The particular problem arose when a number
of packets arrived at once. TCP attempted to process all of these
packets before awaking the user. As a result, by the time the last
packet arrived, there was a threaded list of packets which had several
items on it. When a new packet arrived, the list was searched to find
the location into which the packet should be inserted. Obviously, the
list should be searched from highest sequence number to lowest sequence
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number, because one is expecting to receive a packet which comes after
those already received. By mistake, the list was searched from front to
back, starting with the packets with the lowest sequence number. The
amount of time spent searching this list backwards was easily detectable
in the metering measurements.
Other data structures can be organized to optimize the action which
is normally taken on them. For example, the retransmission queue is
very seldom actually used for retransmission, so it should not be
organized to optimize that action. In fact, it should be organized to
optimized the discarding of things from it when the acknowledgement
arrives. In many cases, the easiest way to do this is not to save the
packet at all, but to reconstruct it only if it needs to be
retransmitted, starting from the data as it was originally buffered by
the user.
There is another generality, at least as important as optimizing
the common case, which is to avoid copying data any more times than
necessary. One more result from the Multics TCP may prove enlightening
here. Multics takes between two and three milliseconds within the TCP
layer to process an incoming packet, depending on its size. For a 576-
byte packet, the three milliseconds is used up approximately as follows.
One millisecond is used computing the checksum. Six hundred
microseconds is spent copying the data. (The data is copied twice, at
.3 milliseconds a copy.) One of those copy operations could correctly
be included as part of the checksum cost, since it is done to get the
data on a known word boundary to optimize the checksum algorithm.
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However, the copy also performs another necessary transfer at the same
time. Header processing and packet resequencing takes .7 milliseconds.
The rest of the time is used in miscellaneous processing, such as
removing packets from the retransmission queue which are acknowledged by
this packet. Data copying is the second most expensive single operation
after data checksuming. Some implementations, often because of an
excessively layered modularity, end up copying the data around a great
deal. Other implementations end up copying the data because there is no
shared memory between processes, and the data must be moved from process
to process via a kernel operation. Unless the amount of this activity
is kept strictly under control, it will quickly become the major
performance bottleneck.
7. Conclusions
This document has addressed two aspects of obtaining performance
from a protocol implementation, the way in which the protocol is layered
and integrated into the operating system, and the way in which the
detailed handling of the packet is optimized. It would be nice if one
or the other of these costs would completely dominate, so that all of
one's attention could be concentrated there. Regrettably, this is not
so. Depending on the particular sort of traffic one is getting, for
example, whether Telnet one-byte packets or file transfer maximum size
packets at maximum speed, one can expect to see one or the other cost
being the major bottleneck to throughput. Most implementors who have
studied their programs in an attempt to find out where the time was
going have reached the unsatisfactory conclusion that it is going
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equally to all parts of their program. With the possible exception of
checksum processing, very few people have ever found that their
performance problems were due to a single, horrible bottleneck which
they could fix by a single stroke of inventive programming. Rather, the
performance was something which was improved by painstaking tuning of
the entire program.
Most discussions of protocols begin by introducing the concept of
layering, which tends to suggest that layering is a fundamentally
wonderful idea which should be a part of every consideration of
protocols. In fact, layering is a mixed blessing. Clearly, a layer
interface is necessary whenever more than one client of a particular
layer is to be allowed to use that same layer. But an interface,
precisely because it is fixed, inevitably leads to a lack of complete
understanding as to what one layer wishes to obtain from another. This
has to lead to inefficiency. Furthermore, layering is a potential snare
in that one is tempted to think that a layer boundary, which was an
artifact of the specification procedure, is in fact the proper boundary
to use in modularizing the implementation. Again, in certain cases, an
architected layer must correspond to an implemented layer, precisely so
that several clients can have access to that layer in a reasonably
straightforward manner. In other cases, cunning rearrangement of the
implemented module boundaries to match with various functions, such as
the demultiplexing of incoming packets, or the sending of asynchronous
outgoing packets, can lead to unexpected performance improvements
compared to more traditional implementation strategies. Finally, good
performance is something which is difficult to retrofit onto an existing
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program. Since performance is influenced, not just by the fine detail,
but by the gross structure, it is sometimes the case that in order to
obtain a substantial performance improvement, it is necessary to
completely redo the program from the bottom up. This is a great
disappointment to programmers, especially those doing a protocol
implementation for the first time. Programmers who are somewhat
inexperienced and unfamiliar with protocols are sufficiently concerned
with getting their program logically correct that they do not have the
capacity to think at the same time about the performance of the
structure they are building. Only after they have achieved a logically
correct program do they discover that they have done so in a way which
has precluded real performance. Clearly, it is more difficult to design
a program thinking from the start about both logical correctness and
performance. With time, as implementors as a group learn more about the
appropriate structures to use for building protocols, it will be
possible to proceed with an implementation project having more
confidence that the structure is rational, that the program will work,
and that the program will work well. Those of us now implementing
protocols have the privilege of being on the forefront of this learning
process. It should be no surprise that our programs sometimes suffer
from the uncertainty we bring to bear on them.
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Citations
[1] Cohen and Postel, "On Protocol Multiplexing", Sixth Data
Communications Symposium, ACM/IEEE, November 1979.
[2] Bunch and Day, "Control Structure Overhead in TCP", Trends and
Applications: Computer Networking, NBS Symposium, May 1980.