Performance

One of the benefits of FD.io VPP is it's high performance on relatively low-power computing. Included are the following.

  • A high-performance user-space network stack designed for commodity hardware:

    • L2, L3 and L4 features and encapsulations.

  • Optimized packet interfaces supporting a multitude of use cases:

    • An integrated vhost-user backend for high speed VM-to-VM connectivity

    • An integrated memif container backend for high speed Container-to-Container connectivity

    • An integrated vhost based interface to punt packets to the Linux Kernel

  • The same optimized code-paths run execute on the host, and inside VMs and Linux containers

  • Leverages best-of-breed open source driver technology: DPDK

  • Tested at scale; linear core scaling, tested with millions of flows and mac addresses

These features have been designed to take full advantage of common micro-processor optimization techniques, such as:

  • Reducing cache and TLS misses by processing packets in vectors

  • Realizing IPC gains with vector instructions such as: SSE, AVX and NEON

  • Eliminating mode switching, context switches and blocking, to always be doing useful work

  • Cache-lined aligned buffers for cache and memory efficiency

CSIT

The Continuous System Integration and Testing (CSIT) project provides functional and performance testing for FD.io VPP. This testing is focused on functional and performance regressions. The results are posted to CSIT Test Report.

For more about CSIT checkout the following links:

Packet Throughput examples

Following are pointers to a few of the CSIT test reports. The test's titles read like this:

<packet size>-<number of threads><number of cores>-<test>-<interface type>

For example the test with the title 64b-2t1c-l2switching-base-i40e is the test that does l2 switching using 64 byte packets, 2 threads, 1 core using an i40e interface.

Here are a few examples: