Impact of CPU-bound Processes on IP Forwarding of Linux and Windows XP

These days, commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software are used tobuild high-end and powerful workstations and servers to be deployed in today’s local areanetworks of private homes and small- to medium-sized business. Typically, these servers aremultipurpose and shared - running networking functionalities involving IP packet forwarding inaddition to other CPU intensive applications. In this paper we study and investigate the impactof running CPU-bound applications on the performance of IP packet forwarding. We measureand compare the impact and performance for the two operating systems of choice for home andsmall-business users, namely Linux and Windows XP. The performance is studied in terms ofkey performance metrics which include throughput, packet loss, round-trip delay, and CPUavailability. For our measurements, we consider today s typical home network hosts of modernprocessors and Gigabit network cards. We also consider different configuration setups andutilize open-source tools to generate relatively high traffic rates. Our empirical results showthat Linux exhibits superior performance over Windows XP in terms of IP forwardingperformance. Results also show that, unlike Windows XP, the IP forwarding performance ofLinux is not significantly impacted by running CPU-bound applications