Active Zero-copy: A performance study of non-deterministic messaging

Zero-copy communication exchanges the messages among the buffers that are allocated and locked before the communication itself. This communication style fits into applications that the communication timings and the message sizes are known in its initialization phase. However, another application with non-deterministic messaging such as web or parallel database can not fit into the style because the sizes and timings of its messages change at every communication. This paper proposes a new zero-copy communication style for these kind of application, called active zerocopy, that receives messages without pre-allocated buffers. The performance evaluation with the active zero-copy comparing with the conventional zero-copy, when the applications with non-deterministic messaging is applied, shows its efficiency.