The article discusses the advantages of dynamically managing network traffic through a mechanism that alternates between polling and interrupt-driven processing. Polling is efficient for heavy traffic, while interrupts excel in light traffic. Karsten emphasizes the resource savings achieved by detecting current traffic conditions, thus providing better performance without unnecessary energy consumption. The implementation of this mechanism requires minor adjustments in applications and system settings, resulting in a performance that approximates busy polling but with lower CPU utilization, leading to potential energy savings.
When network traffic is heavy, it is most efficient to disable interrupts and use polling mode. But with light traffic, interrupt-driven processing works best.
An implementation using only polling would waste resources during light traffic, while relying only on interrupts becomes inefficient during heavy traffic.
Our mechanism automatically detects network traffic and switches between polling and interrupt-driven to get the best of both worlds.
Enabling the feature requires a small tweak to applications and a configuration variable, leading to performance close to full busy polling with lower CPU usage.
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