Lightweight always-on network latency monitoring with eBPF
Network latency plays a crucial role for many applications and has been shown to have a considerable impact on the users’ quality of experience. Continuously and efficiently monitoring network latency is important for understanding the performance of any applications that run on top of the network today, and will become even more important in the future with an increasing focus on interactive and real-time applications. Always-on passive monitoring of network latency can provide continuous latency metrics without injecting any traffic into the network. However, current software-based passive network monitoring tools often struggle to keep up with the traffic as packet rates increase.
We investigate the feasibility of using the emerging eBPF technology to enable lightweight passive network latency monitoring by implementing evolved Passive Ping (ePPing). ePPing can run on Linux devices at speeds of over 10 Gigabits per second on a single core, without requiring special hardware support or modifications of the kernel network stack, improving on current state-of-the-art software-based solutions. and has been shown to have a considerable impact on the users’ quality of experience.
Speaker: Simon Sundberg, Karlstad University
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