I read a paper recently and in some cases anyway, even the operating system doing TCP for you can be slow. The paper was "Network Stack Specialization for Perf

I read a paper recently and in some cases anyway, even the operating system doing TCP for you can be slow. The paper was "Network Stack Specialization for Performance" and by moving pretty much all of tcp out of the kernel and into userspace they were able to get a web server that outperformed nginx 3.5x or so. The point of this particular paper was that, as the title suggests, keeping these things generalized as they must be in the kernel comes at a fairly significant performance cost. Now obviously I don't want to have to write tcp for every network application I write, but it is interesting to think of such things as libraries instead of in the kernel, where I can pick the tcp that I know performs best for my particular application. http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2013/papers/hotnets-final43.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2013/papers/hotnets-f...