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On the performance of commodity hardware for low latency and low jitter packet processing

With the introduction of Virtual Network Functions (VNF), network processing is no longer done solely on special purpose hardware. Instead, deploying network functions on commodity servers increases flexibility and has been proven effective for many network applications. However, new industrial applications and the Internet of Things (IoT) call for event-based systems and midleware that can deliver ultra-low and predictable latency, which present a challenge for the packet processing infrastructure they are deployed on. In this industry experience paper, we take a hands-on look on the performance of network functions on commodity servers to determine the feasibility of using them in existing and future latency-critical event-based applications. We identify sources of significant latency (delays in packet processing and forwarding) and jitter (variation in latency) and we propose application- and system-level improvements for removing or keeping them within required limits. Our results show that network functions that are highly optimized for throughput perform sub-optimally under the very different requirements set by latency-critical applications, compared to latency-optimized versions that have up to 9.8X lower latency. We also show that hardware-aware, system-level configurations, such as disabling frequency scaling technologies, greatly reduce jitter by up 2.4X and lead to more predictable latency.