Analysis of cache and tlb effectiveness in processing network i/o

This paper considers the question of how effective caches are in processing network I/O. Our analysis shows that operating system structure plays a key role in the caches behavior, with BSD Unix (a monolithic OS) making more effective use of the cache than Mach (a microkernel OS). Moreover, closer inspection shows that several factors contribute to this result, including how TLBs are managed, how scheduling points are interspersed with data accesses, how data is laid out in memory, and how network functionality is distributed between user space and the kernel.

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