Unleash Networks is a member of the Intel Software Partner Program. Thanks to the program we have access to a powerful tool for measuring multi core performance of the new Trisul Open Source Network Metering and Forensics tool. I installed the 45-day eval of the Intel Thread Profiler for Windows with the Linux Data Collector.
I then measured Trisul‘s packet processing performance on a dual core system. The results are at the Project Wiki Site.
From my various experiments with threading packet processing, I am leaning towards these conclusions
1. Getting packet processing right on multiple cores is hard.
2. Traditional threading systems seem to be very difficult to get right. Given the volume of tokens (packets), it is easy to incur too much synchronization overhead or severely impact cache performance.
3. Task based approaches like the Intel Threading Building Blocks appear more attractive.
The next major task would be to create a quick prototype application using the Intel TBB library and revisit the measurements.
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Trisul news :
I got some email pointing out that the DEB and RPM packages were missing. Sorry, they will be up shortly. The packager is broken.
There are many packet processing tools like Ntop, Snort, Sancp, Argus, etc. Trisul will hopefully find a niche because of its ability to reduce traffic data to a SQL database and its extensible architecture that allows other functions to be plugged in. (Documentation about the architecture is not yet available but see the sysplugs directory in the source code)
