Network Stack Locking

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Matthew Dillon wrote:

>     Deep message queues aren't necessarily a problem and, in fact, having
>     one or two dozen messages backed up in a protocol thread's message
>     port is actually good because the thread can then process all the
>     messages in a tight loop (cpu and cache locality of reference).  If
>     designed properly, this directly mitigates the cost of a thread switch
>     as system load increases.  So message queueing has the opposite effect...
>     per-unit handling overhead *decreases* as system load increases.

Actually, this was the specific point I was making also :-).  The question
I was asking was about the depth of the message queues between protocol
stack layers in actual measurements -- are you observing substantial
coallescing between layers as a result of the queues at this point?  I'm
looking for emperical evidence that the coallescing does make up for the
extra context switches of the model in practice...

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research