Network latency in SmartOS virtual machines

Today I decided to explore network latency in SmartOS virtual machines. Using the rbczmq ruby gem for ZeroMQ, I made two very simple scripts: a server that replies “hello” and a benchmark script that times how long it takes to send and receive 5000 messages after establishing the connection.

The server code is:

require 'rbczmq'
ctx = ZMQ::Context.new
sock = ctx.socket ZMQ::REP
sock.bind("tcp://0.0.0.0:5555")
loop do
  sock.recv
  sock.send "reply"
end

The benchmark code is:

require 'rbczmq'
require 'benchmark'

ctx = ZMQ::Context.new
sock = ctx.socket ZMQ::REQ
sock.connect(ARGV[0])

# establish the connection
sock.send "hello"
sock.recv

# run 5000 cycles of send request, receive reply.
puts Benchmark.measure {
  5000.times {
    sock.send "hello"
    sock.recv
  }
}

The test machines are:

* Mac laptop – server & benchmarking
* SmartOS1 (SmartOS virtual machine/zone) server & benchmarking
* SmartOS2 (SmartOS virtual machine/zone) benchmarking
* Linux1 (Ubuntu Linux in KVM virtual machine) server & benchmarking
* Linux2 (Ubuntu Linux in KVM virtual machine) benchmarking

The results are:

Source      Dest        Connection      Time          Req-Rep/Sec
------      ----        ----------      ----          --------
Mac         Linux1      1Gig Ethernet   5.038577      992.3
Mac         SmartOS1    1Gig Ethernet   4.972102      1005.6
Linux2      Linux1      Virtual         1.696516      2947.2
SmartOS2    Linux1      Virtual         1.153557      4334.4
Linux2      SmartOS1    Virtual         0.952066      5251.8
Linux1      Linux1      localhost       0.836955      5974.0
Mac         Mac         localhost       0.781815      6395.4
SmartOS2    SmartOS1    Virtual         0.470290      10631.7
SmartOS1    SmartOS1    localhost       0.374373      13355.7

localhost tests use 127.0.0.1

SmartOS has an impressive network stack. Request-reply times from one SmartOS machine to another are over 3 times faster than when using Linux under KVM (on the same host). This mightn’t make much of a difference to web requests coming from slow mobile device connections, but if your web server is making many requests to internal services (database, cache, etc) this could make a noticeable difference.