Performance Tuning Network Applications
Recently at work I spent a few weeks tuning a network service across three platforms (Solaris, Linux, and AIX) to get within 10% of the theoretical maximum throughput. In this short article, I’ll walk through the various tools I used to improve the performance of the application.
This application is very specialized in that the two machines are connected directly through an ethernet switch. This means that the MTU could easily be determined from each end of the link and the extra work to determine the maximum segment size for the transit network (see RFC 1191) was unnecessary. This also made it very easy to watch the traffic between the two hosts as well as the system calls they were using to transfer and receive the data.
