A performance comparison of communication APIs on Solaris and Windows operating systems

S. Zeadally, Jia Lu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Communication application programming interfaces (API) constitute an important component of many network-based applications. They play a central role in the end-to-end performance ultimately delivered by networked applications. Most network architectures exploit the underlying networking API in their designs. In this paper, we conduct an empirical performance evaluation on the PC platform of some of the most popular networking API which include: Winsock/BSD, Java, and RMI. To explore the impact of the underlying operating system and Java virtual machine (JVM) architecture, we conducted performance tests on two operating systems namely, Windows NT 4.0 and Solaris 8. We found that on both operating system platforms, Winsock and BSD sockets yield about 1.8 times better throughput than Java sockets, and Java sockets in turn yield twice the throughput of that obtained using remote method invocation (RMI). We also obtained about 1.3 times higher latency overheads with Java compared to either Winsock or BSD as well as with RMI when compared to Java sockets on both Windows NT and Solaris operating systems. We hope that our results will be useful to application designers and developers in better optimizing end-to-end application performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - ITCC 2003, International Conference on Information Technology
Subtitle of host publicationComputers and Communications
EditorsPradip K. Srimani, Emma Regentova, Ray Hashemi, Elaine Lawrence, Mario Cannataro, Amanda Spink, Wolf Bein
Pages336-340
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)0769519164, 9780769519166
DOIs
StatePublished - 2003
EventInternational Conference on Information Technology: Computers and Communications, ITCC 2003 - Las Vegas, United States
Duration: Apr 28 2003Apr 30 2003

Publication series

NameProceedings ITCC 2003, International Conference on Information Technology: Computers and Communications

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Information Technology: Computers and Communications, ITCC 2003
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLas Vegas
Period4/28/034/30/03

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Media Technology
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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