Impact of Network Latency

Figure 6: Impact of network latency on read and write performance.

Our experiments thus far have assumed a lightly loaded Gigabit Ethernet LAN. The observed round trip times on our LAN is very small ($<$1ms). In practice, the latency between the client and the server can vary from a few milliseconds to tens of milliseconds depending on the distance between the client and the server. Consequently, in this section, we vary the network latency between the two machines and study its impact on performance.

We use the NISTNet package to introduce a latency between the client and the server. NISTNet introduces a pre-configured delay for each outgoing and incoming packet so as to simulate wide-area conditions. We vary the round-trip network latency from 10ms to 90ms and study its impact on the sequential and random reads and writes. The experimental setup is identical to that outlined in the previous section. Figure 6 plots the completion times for reading and writing a 128 MB file for NFS and iSCSI. As shown in Figure 6(a), the completion time increases with the network latency for both systems. However, the increase is greater in NFS than in iSCSI--the two systems are comparable at low latencies ($\leq$ 10ms) and the NFS performance degrades faster than iSCSI for higher latencies. Even though NFS v3 runs over TCP, an Ethereal trace reveals an increasing number of RPC retransmissions at higher latencies. The Linux NFS client appears to time-out more frequently at higher latencies and reissues the RPC request, even though the data is in transit, which in turn dregrades performance. An implementation of NFS that exploits the error recovery at the TCP layer will not have this drawback.

In case of writes, the iSCSI completion times are not affected by the network latency due to their asynchronous nature. The NFS performance is impacted by the pseudo-synchronous nature of writes in the Linux NFS implementation (see Section 4.5) and increases with the latency.