Network application programming interfaces (APIs) performance on commodity operating systems

S. Zeadally; L. Zhang; Z. Zhu; J. Lu

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2003.08.005

Network application programming interfaces (APIs) performance on commodity operating systems

S. Zeadally, L. Zhang, Z. Zhu, J. Lu

School of Information Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are important components of network-based applications. They play a central role in the end-to-end performance ultimately delivered by networked applications. In addition, most network architectures exploit the underlying networking APIs in their designs. We present an empirical performance evaluation on the PC platform of the most popular networking APIs, namely: Winsock/BSD, Java, and RMI.To explore the impact of the underlying operating system and the Java Virtual Machine architecture on the networking APIs, we conducted performance tests on four widely used operating systems namely, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris 8. We found that RMI latency is 1.7 times higher over Java. Latency over Java is around two to three times higher than over native Windows or BSD sockets. Moreover, native sockets yield around 1.8 and 3.5 times higher throughput over Java and RMI, respectively. We hope that our results will be useful to application designers and developers and help them better optimize the end-to-end performance of their applications with a knowledge of the performance of the underlying networking APIs.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	397-402
Number of pages	6
Journal	Information and Software Technology
Volume	46
Issue number	6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2003.08.005
State	Published - May 1 2004

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by a grant (EDUD-7824-000145-US) from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Palo Alto). The authors thank DV Sreenath for his suggestions on improving the quality of this paper. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions which greatly helped to improve the quality and presentation of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by a grant (EDUD-7824-000145-US) from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Palo Alto). The authors thank DV Sreenath for his suggestions on improving the quality of this paper. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions which greatly helped to improve the quality and presentation of this paper.

Funders	Funder number
Sun Microsystems Inc.

Keywords

API
Networking
Operating system
Performance
Socket

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Information Systems
Computer Science Applications

Access to Document

10.1016/j.infsof.2003.08.005

Cite this

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title = "Network application programming interfaces (APIs) performance on commodity operating systems",

abstract = "Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are important components of network-based applications. They play a central role in the end-to-end performance ultimately delivered by networked applications. In addition, most network architectures exploit the underlying networking APIs in their designs. We present an empirical performance evaluation on the PC platform of the most popular networking APIs, namely: Winsock/BSD, Java, and RMI.To explore the impact of the underlying operating system and the Java Virtual Machine architecture on the networking APIs, we conducted performance tests on four widely used operating systems namely, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris 8. We found that RMI latency is 1.7 times higher over Java. Latency over Java is around two to three times higher than over native Windows or BSD sockets. Moreover, native sockets yield around 1.8 and 3.5 times higher throughput over Java and RMI, respectively. We hope that our results will be useful to application designers and developers and help them better optimize the end-to-end performance of their applications with a knowledge of the performance of the underlying networking APIs.",

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AU - Zhang, L.

AU - Zhu, Z.

AU - Lu, J.

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N2 - Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are important components of network-based applications. They play a central role in the end-to-end performance ultimately delivered by networked applications. In addition, most network architectures exploit the underlying networking APIs in their designs. We present an empirical performance evaluation on the PC platform of the most popular networking APIs, namely: Winsock/BSD, Java, and RMI.To explore the impact of the underlying operating system and the Java Virtual Machine architecture on the networking APIs, we conducted performance tests on four widely used operating systems namely, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris 8. We found that RMI latency is 1.7 times higher over Java. Latency over Java is around two to three times higher than over native Windows or BSD sockets. Moreover, native sockets yield around 1.8 and 3.5 times higher throughput over Java and RMI, respectively. We hope that our results will be useful to application designers and developers and help them better optimize the end-to-end performance of their applications with a knowledge of the performance of the underlying networking APIs.

AB - Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are important components of network-based applications. They play a central role in the end-to-end performance ultimately delivered by networked applications. In addition, most network architectures exploit the underlying networking APIs in their designs. We present an empirical performance evaluation on the PC platform of the most popular networking APIs, namely: Winsock/BSD, Java, and RMI.To explore the impact of the underlying operating system and the Java Virtual Machine architecture on the networking APIs, we conducted performance tests on four widely used operating systems namely, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris 8. We found that RMI latency is 1.7 times higher over Java. Latency over Java is around two to three times higher than over native Windows or BSD sockets. Moreover, native sockets yield around 1.8 and 3.5 times higher throughput over Java and RMI, respectively. We hope that our results will be useful to application designers and developers and help them better optimize the end-to-end performance of their applications with a knowledge of the performance of the underlying networking APIs.

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Network application programming interfaces (APIs) performance on commodity operating systems

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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