Performance analysis of network protocol offload in a simulation environment

Increasing network traffic becomes a burden on the server CPUs, which need to process more packets and still have room for application software. In this paper, we report performance simulation and analysis for servers equipped with TCP/UDP/IP offload engines (TOEs). We compared the effects of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and TCP/UDP/IP communications spikes on CPU utilization. Our performance analysis shows a significant reduction in CPU utilization using TOE-based network interface cards. In addition, Hyper-Threading (SMT) technology can ease the load on the CPU, especially when network traffic spikes are introduced