The performance of receive side TCP processing has traditionally been dominated by the cost of the 'per-byte' operations, such as data copying and checksumming. We show that architectural trends in modern processors, in particular aggressive prefetching, ...

Despite major advances in the engineering of maintainable and robust software over the years, upgrading software remains a primitive and error-prone activity. In this paper, we argue that several problems with upgrading software are caused by a poor ...

In order to get your paper accepted at a major conference, the idea you develop in the paper must be complex, preferably even incomprehensible to all but the few experts. In order to have your idea have any impact in a real system, it must be simple ...

This paper is concerned with performance debugging of multi-tier applications, such as commonly found in servers and dynamic-content web sites. Existing tools and techniques for profiling such applications are not general enough to track and profile ...

We present a memory-aware load balancing (MALB) technique to dispatch transactions to replicas in a replicated database. Our MALB algorithm exploits knowledge of the working sets of transactions to assign them to replicas in such a way that they ...

This paper presents hardware and software mechanisms to enable concurrent direct network access (CDNA) by operating systems running within a virtual machine monitor. In a conventional virtual machine monitor, each operating system running within a virtual ...

In this paper, we propose and evaluate three techniques for optimizing network performance in the Xen virtualized environment. Our techniques retain the basic Xen architecture of locating device drivers in a privileged 'driver' domain with access to ...

Generalized snapshot isolation extends snapshot isolation as used in Oracle and other databases in a manner suitable for replicated databases. While (conventional) snapshot isolation requires that transactions observe the "latest" snapshot of the database, ...

In this paper we introduce Causeway, operating system support facilitating the development of meta-applications, like priority scheduling and performance debugging, that control and analyze the execution of distributed programs. Meta-applications use ...

Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environment can differ markedly from ...