Performance Review of Zero Copy Techniques

E-government and corporate servers will require higher performance and security as usage increases. Zero copy refers to a collection of techniques which reduce the number of copies of blocks of data in order to make data transfer more efficient. By avoiding redundant data copies, the consumption of memory and CPU resources are reduced, thereby improving performance of the server. To eliminate costly data copies between user space and kernel space or between two buffers in the kernel space, various schemes are used, such as memory remapping, shared buffers, and hardware support. However, the advantages are sometimes overestimated and new security issues arise. This paper describes different approaches to implementing zero copy and evaluates these methods for their performance and security considerations, to help when evaluating these techniques for use in e-government applications.