Benchmarking NFV Software Dataplanes

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks NFV software dataplanes SoftNIC and ClickOS, revealing performance bottlenecks with small packets and NUMA effects, and proposes resource allocation strategies to improve their packet processing capabilities.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive performance comparison of SoftNIC and ClickOS under various workloads and offers practical strategies to enhance their scalability and efficiency.

Findings

Both dataplanes struggle with small packet processing.

NUMA effects influence optimal VM placement.

Resource allocation strategies improve performance.

Abstract

A key enabling technology of NFV is software dataplane, which has attracted much attention in both academia and industry recently. Yet, till now there is little understanding about its performance in practice. In this paper, we make a benchmark measurement study of NFV software dataplanes in terms of packet processing capability, one of the most fundamental and critical performance metrics. Specifically, we compare two state-of-the-art open-source NFV dataplanes, SoftNIC and ClickOS, using commodity 10GbE NICs under various typical workloads. Our key observations are that (1) both dataplanes have performance issues processing small (<=128B) packets; (2) it is not always best to put all VMs of a service chain on one server due to NUMA effect. We propose resource allocation strategies to remedy the problems, including carefully adding CPU cores and vNICs to VMs, and spreading VMs of a service chain to separate servers. To fundamentally address these problems and scale their performance, SoftNIC and ClickOS could improve the support for NIC queues and multiple cores.