Network service

In computer networking, a network service is an application running at the network application layer and above, that provides data storage, manipulation, presentation, communication or other capability which is often implemented using a client–server or peer-to-peer architecture based on application layer network protocols. Each service is usually provided by a server component running on one or more computers (often a dedicated server computer offering multiple services) and accessed via a network by client components running on other devices. However, the client and server components can both be run on the same machine. Clients and servers will often have a user interface, and sometimes other hardware associated with it. Examples Examples are the Domain Name System (DNS) which translates domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to assign networking configuration information to network hosts. Authentication serve

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Automated Synthesis of Adversarial Workloads for Network Functions

Jonas Fietz, Luis David Figueiredo Mascarenhas Moreira Pedrosa, Rishabh Ramesh Iyer, Arseniy Zaostrovnykh

Software network functions promise to simplify the deployment of network services and reduce network operation cost. However, they face the challenge of unpredictable performance. Given this performance variability, it is imperative that during deployment, network operators consider the performance of the NF not only for typical but also adversarial workloads. We contribute a tool that helps solve this challenge: it takes as input the LLVM code of a network function and outputs packet sequences that trigger slow execution paths. Under the covers, it combines directed symbolic execution with a sophisticated cache model to look for execution paths that incur many CPU cycles and involve adversarial memory-access patterns. We used our tool on 11 network functions that implement a variety of data structures and dis- covered workloads that can in some cases triple latency and cut throughput by 19% relative to typical testing workloads.

ACM2018

Performance Contracts for Software Network Functions

George Candea, Luis David Figueiredo Mascarenhas Moreira Pedrosa, Rishabh Ramesh Iyer, Solal Vincenzo Pirelli, Arseniy Zaostrovnykh

Software network functions (NFs), or middleboxes, promise flexibility and easy deployment of network services but face the serious challenge of unexpected performance behaviour. We propose the notion of a performance contract, a construct formulated in terms of performance critical variables, that provides a precise description of NF performance. Performance contracts enable fine-grained prediction and scrutiny of NF performance for arbitrary workloads, without having to run the NF itself. We describe BOLT, a technique and tool for computing such performance contracts for the entire software stack of NFs written in C, including the core NF logic, DPDK packet processing framework, and NIC driver. BOLT takes as input the NF implementation code and outputs the corresponding contract. Under the covers, it combines pre-analysis of a library of stateful NF data structures with automated symbolic execution of the NF’s code. We evaluate BOLT on four NFs—a Maglev-like load balancer, a NAT, an LPM router, and a MAC bridge—and show that its performance contracts predict the dynamic instruction count and memory access count with a maximum gap of 7% between the real execution and the conservatively predicted upper bound. With further engineering, this gap can be reduced.

USENIX ASSOC2019

Diagnosing Performance Overheads in the Xen Virtual Machine Environment

Aravind Menon, Willy Zwaenepoel

Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environ- ment can differ markedly from its performance in a non- virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual ma- chines. However, few tools are currently available to help de- bug performance problems in virtual machine environments. In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statis- tical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual ma- chine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profil- ing of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads in- curred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is relatively expensive. Our experimental re- sults quantify Xen's performance overheads for network I/O device virtualization in uni- and multi-processor systems. Our results identify the main sources of this overhead which should be the focus of Xen optimization efforts. We also show how our profiling toolkit was used to uncover and re- solve performance bugs that we encountered in our experi- ments which caused unexpected application behavior.

2005

CS-305: Software engineering

This course teaches the basics of modern software development: designing software, working in a team, writing good code, shipping software, and evolving software. It emphasizes building software that meets high standards of quality, reliability, security, and manageability.

Operating system

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Computer network

A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with eac

Internet

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of net