SAIO (Scalable Asynchronous I/O Extension)

This project is considered as the insight into general solutions to scalability issues in AIO (asynchronous I/O) model. We proposed a offloading framework for I/O-intensive applications, using zero-copy scheme and M on-N threading system, as a generic scalable solution along with its adoption process of event-driven servers. This work extends our previous work ESCA into asynchronous I/O model, which provides better scalability. With SAIO, HTTP/HTTPS servers have been demonstrated to outperform typical configurations in the aspects of throughput and latency. Moreover, we exhibit SAIO’s potential impact on TLS in kernel (kTLS).

Prerequisite

For Nginx and wrk:

sudo apt install build-essential libpcre3 libpcre3-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev
sudo apt install libssl-dev libgd-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev uuid-dev
sudo apt install autoconf automake libtool

Download project

git clone https://github.com/eecheng87/SAIO.git
cd SAIO

# download testbench
git submodule update --init

Build from source

SAIO has been deployed to lighttpd, Nginx (TLS+kTLS), Redis and memcached (TLS). Also, SAIO shows the impact on all of these targets

Nginx

# download and build Nginx with tls
make config TARGET=ngx CONFIG=tls
sudo make
make nginx CONFIG=tls

# download and build Nginx with ktls
sudo modprobe tls
make config TARGET=ngx CONFIG=ktls
sudo make
make nginx CONFIG=ktls

Memcached

Support for memcached is only available in the branch mcache, which is designed with multi-threading model.

# download and build memcached
make config TARGET=mcached
sudo make

# download and build the benchmarking tool
make memtier

# sample for launching memcached
LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/preload.so ./memcached -t 1

# sample for launching memtier_benchmarking
./memtier_benchmark -p 11211 --protocol=memcache_text --clients=100 --threads=5 --ratio=1:1 --key-pattern=R:R --key-minimum=16 --key-maximum=16 --data-size=128 --test-time=5

Redis

# download and build Redis without tls
make config TARGET=redis
sudo make
make redis tls=no

# download and build Redis with tls
make config TARGET=redis CONFIG=tls
sudo make
make redis tls=yes

Evaluation

The following experiments will evaluate throughput, latency, and scalability, which are extremely important for EDAs. All experiments are run on Marvell ThunderX2 CN9975 powered R281-T91 Arm server with the characteristics shown in Table.

Component	Specification
Thread(s) per core	4
NUMA node	2
Core(s) per socket	28
Memory	128 GiB
CPU Architecture	Arm64

The structural scalability of Nginx

Throughput of Nginx with varied connection number

Tail latency of Nginx with different throughput