# Application-Agnostic Offloading of Packet Processing

## TL;DR

The paper introduces Santa, an architecture that offloads packet processing to improve server performance, achieving up to 5.5x speedup in kernel-based applications like DNS, Memcached, and HTTP.

## Contribution

Santa provides a novel, application-agnostic offloading architecture that enhances packet processing efficiency in kernel-based systems.

## Key findings

- Santa accelerates kernel-based packet processing by up to 5.5 times.
- Performance improvements are demonstrated across DNS, Memcached, and HTTP.
- The architecture is flexible and applicable to various network applications.

## Abstract

As network speed increases, servers struggle to serve all requests directed at them. This challenge is rooted in a partitioned data path where the split between the kernel space networking stack and user space applications induces overheads. To address this challenge, we propose Santa, a new architecture to optimize the data path by enabling server applications to partially offload packet processing to a generic rule processor. We exemplify Santa by showing how it can drastically accelerate kernel-based packet processing - a currently neglected domain. Our evaluation of a broad class of applications, namely DNS, Memcached, and HTTP, highlights that Santa can substantially improve the server performance by a factor of 5.5, 2.1, and 2.5, respectively.