Datacenter RPCs can be General and Fast
Anuj Kalia, Michael Kaminsky, David G. Andersen

TL;DR
eRPC demonstrates that general-purpose RPC libraries can achieve high performance comparable to specialized systems on commodity hardware, supporting scalable, low-latency datacenter communication.
Contribution
This paper introduces eRPC, a general-purpose RPC library that matches the performance of specialized systems on commodity datacenter hardware without requiring niche technologies.
Findings
Handles up to 10 million small RPCs per second per CPU core
Achieves 75 Gbps bandwidth for large messages
Provides 5.5 microseconds latency for Raft replication on lossy Ethernet
Abstract
It is commonly believed that datacenter networking software must sacrifice generality to attain high performance. The popularity of specialized distributed systems designed specifically for niche technologies such as RDMA, lossless networks, FPGAs, and programmable switches testifies to this belief. In this paper, we show that such specialization is not necessary. eRPC is a new general-purpose remote procedure call (RPC) library that offers performance comparable to specialized systems, while running on commodity CPUs in traditional datacenter networks based on either lossy Ethernet or lossless fabrics. eRPC performs well in three key metrics: message rate for small messages; bandwidth for large messages; and scalability to a large number of nodes and CPU cores. It handles packet loss, congestion, and background request execution. In microbenchmarks, one CPU core can handle up to 10…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInterconnection Networks and Systems · Advanced Data Storage Technologies · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
