Speeding Up TCP/IP: Faster Processors Are Not Enough

Over the last decade the authors' have been witnessing a tremendous increase in the capacities of the computation and communication systems. On one hand. processor speeds have been increasing exponentially, doubling every 18 months or so, while network bandwidth, has followed a similar (if not higher) rate of improvement, doubling every 9-12 months, or so. Unfortunately, applications that communicate frequently using standard protocols like TCP/IP (10 not seem to improve at similar rates. In the attempt to understand the magnitude and reasons for this gap between processor performance and interprocess communication performance, the paper studies the execution of TCP/IP on several processors and operating systems that span a time interval of more than eight years.