Web100 For Linux

Web100 project was created to produce a complete host-software environment that will run common TCP applications at 100% of the available bandwidth, regardless of the magnitude of a network's capability.

While the national high-performance network infrastructure has grown tremendously both in bandwidth and accessibility, it is still common for applications, hosts, researchers and other users to be unable to take full advantage of this new and improved infrastructure.

Without expert attention from network engineers, users are unlikely to achieve even 10 Mbps single stream TCP transfers, despite the fact that the underlying network infrastructure can support data rates of 100Mbps or more.

On unloaded networks, this poor performance can be attributed primarily to two factors: host system software (principally TCP) that is optimized for low bandwidth environments, and the lack of effective instrumentation and tools to diagnose performance issues.

The Web100 project was created to address these problems. The first is addressed with automatic TCP buffer tuning. The Web100 work in this area has been merged with main-line Linux kernel, and is contained in recent releases.

To address the other problem, we have created a set of TCP instruments, defined in an IETF internet-draft. These instruments are implemented in Linux with the Web100 kernel patch.