A TCP Offload Engine Emulator for Estimating the Impact of Removing Protocol Processing From a Host Running Apache HTTP Server

This paper focuses on an emulator used for validating a model for TCP offload. The TCP Offload Engine Emulator (TOE-Em) is a full TCP offload program that emulates the behavior of a TOE device using another PC as a front-end. Its purpose is to study the impact of full offload in a real environment. The authors confronted Apache 2.2 with and without the support of the TOE-Em by requesting different file sets. The CPU utilization and the delay of the system was obtained and analyzed. In the context, full TCP offload was beneficial for files greater than 10 KB.