[Unbound-users] [PATCH] performance increase with SO_REUSEPORT on Linux 3.9+

Robert Edmonds edmonds at debian.org
Tue Jan 7 03:05:54 UTC 2014


Hi,

There is a SO_REUSEPORT socket option available on Linux 3.9+, described
in this LWN article:

    https://lwn.net/Articles/542629/

It is of particular interest to DNS servers, since it allows more evenly
distributing incoming queries among multiple UDP server sockets bound to
the same port:

    As with TCP, SO_REUSEPORT allows multiple UDP sockets to be bound to
    the same port. This facility could, for example, be useful in a DNS
    server operating over UDP. With SO_REUSEPORT, each thread could use
    recv() on its own socket to accept datagrams arriving on the port.
    The traditional approach is that all threads would compete to
    perform recv() calls on a single shared socket. As with the second
    of the traditional TCP scenarios described above, this can lead to
    unbalanced loads across the threads. By contrast, SO_REUSEPORT
    distributes datagrams evenly across all of the receiving threads.

    Tom noted that the traditional SO_REUSEADDR socket option already
    allows multiple UDP sockets to be bound to, and accept datagrams on,
    the same UDP port. However, by contrast with SO_REUSEPORT,
    SO_REUSEADDR does not prevent port hijacking and does not distribute
    datagrams evenly across the receiving threads.

There is also a slide deck available here:

    http://domsch.com/linux/lpc2010/Scaling_techniques_for_servers_with_high_connection%20rates.pdf

I've written a patch for Unbound that enables per-thread server sockets
with SO_REUSEPORT on Linux.  It must be explicitly requested with
"so-reuseport: yes" because Linux < 3.9 doesn't support the socket
option (it will fail with ENOPROTOOPT) and because it has different
semantics on Linux than on other platforms with a similarly named socket
option it has no effect on non-Linux platforms.

Under my simplistic 100% cache hit microbenchmark, Unbound with
SO_REUSEPORT support running on Linux 3.12 achieves somewhat lower CPU
utilization at all query rates except the very highest (I suspect this
is because the patched Unbound is delivering a slightly higher response
rate).  E.g., at 810Kq/s from the traffic generator, unbound trunk
(r3036) consumes 75% of the system's 4 CPUs, while unbound with
SO_REUSEPORT consumes 66%.  I've attached a plot showing the benchmark
data graphically.

-- 
Robert Edmonds
edmonds at debian.org
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