Packet Order Matters! Improving Application Performance by Deliberately Delaying Packets

Explore a groundbreaking conference talk from NSDI '22 that delves into improving application performance by deliberately delaying packets. Discover how the researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Ericsson Research investigate the impact of temporal and spatial traffic locality on high-speed network interfaces in commodity servers. Learn about their innovative software solution, Reframer, which strategically delays and reorders packets to enhance traffic locality. Understand how this counterintuitive approach can significantly boost network service chain throughput and improve web server performance. Gain insights into the experimental setup, real-world trace analysis, and the challenges faced in developing Reframer. Follow the presentation through key topics including packet-level analysis, scalability considerations, and the broader implications for data center networking and application performance optimization.

Introduction
Main Steps
Experimental Setup
Impact on Network Functions
Real-world Trace Analysis
Reframer (Challenges)
Reframer (Design)
Evaluation
Packet Level Analysis
Reframer Scalability
Conclusion