On of the serious drawbacks of Netmap is that it amortizes, but does not mitigate system call latencies. This means that although it can handle high packet rate

On of the serious drawbacks of Netmap is that it amortizes, but does not mitigate system call latencies. This means that although it can handle high packet rates, latencies for processing are dominated by the system call overhead (typically about 5us). This may not sound like much, but on a 10Gb/s network (1 bit = 0.1ns), 5us = 50,000bits or roughly 5KB. For small packets, this means that you have to batch very aggressively (about 150 packets at a time) in order to keep up.