Simple Patch Lets Amazon's EC2 Linux Network Driver Start ~90x Faster

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Simple Patch Lets Amazon's EC2 Linux Network Driver Start ~90x Faster

With how ubiquitous the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is, one may have assumed that for years the software stack was already extensively optimized to insane levels, especially as it concerns the boot time for being able to quickly respond to changes in load... But it turns out there still is some low hanging fruit such as with Amazon's "ENA" network driver and a new patch allowing it to initialize 90 times quicker...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Amazon-EC2-ENA-90x-Startup

[Setif]

the ENA driver initialization time dropped from 173 milliseconds to a mere 1.9 milliseconds

The driver takes 1900000 nanoseconds to initialize, What waste of time!

[flux242]

ha, tell me more about big o notation and algorithmic complexity if I optimize simply by changing a timeout constant!

[programmerjake]

The driver takes 1900 nanoseconds to initialize, What waste of time!

it's actually 1,900,000 nanoseconds or 1900 microseconds.

[accumulator]

Haha, winner of the best clickbaitized title of the year

[microcode]

Kinda wonder why it takes any time at all to initialize a virtual network driver. Surely the host could just leave some state somewhere to tell it where the ring buffers are, then be done with it. I guess I'll have to look at it to find out what they thought was worth doing that wasn't that.

[bridgman]

Am I the only one wondering how tightening up a 5mS polling loop shaved 170mS off the startup time ?

If the poll itself was taking a long time then it still wouldn't take the new startup time down to 2mS.

[andyprough]

Biggest waste of 171.1 ms in my life. The trips I could have taken with that extra time, the mountains I could have climbed ...

[CommunityMember]

While reducing the ethernet driver initialization time is overall goodness, quite honestly most of my EC2 instances take *so* much more time to startup the various applications and services that saving a hundred milliseconds is just noise....

[theriddick]

While its only 171ms, cumulatively it does add up over time if they continue to resolve issues like this. That's the problem with small hanging fruit problems, often very hard to see the value until you knock a fair few of them off the tree!