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Effective System Call Aggregation (ESCA)

The main objective of this work was to reduce the per-syscall overhead through the use of effective syscall aggregation. For that purpose, ESCA takes advantages of system call batching and exploits the parallelism of event-driven applications by leveraging Linux I/O model to overcome the disadvantages of previous solutions.

ESCA is capable of reducing the per-syscall overhead by up to 62% for embedded web servers. Real-world highly concurrent event-driven applications such as Nginx and Redis are known to benefit from ESCA, along with full compatibility with Linux syscall semantics and functionalities.

Demo

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Nginx-ESCA led by about 11% over vanilla Nginx.

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lighttpd-ESCA led by about 13% over vanilla lighttpd.

Presentation

We also present our work with topic: Reduce System Call Overhead for Event-Driven Servers at Open Source Summit Japan 2021, organized by the Linux Foundation.

Academic Paper

Please see our PDP 2022 paper, available in the IEEE Xplore digital library, and you can get a preprint copy.

Citation

If you find this work useful in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{cheng2022esca,
    author={Cheng, Yu-Cheng and Huang, Ching-Chun (Jim) and Tu, Chia-Heng},
    booktitle={2022 30th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing (PDP)},
    title={ESCA: Effective System Call Aggregation for Event-Driven Servers},
    year={2022},
    pages={18-25},
    doi={10.1109/PDP55904.2022.00012}
}