sendmmsg: An Efficient System Call to Send Multiple Messages on Linux

This article describes the limitations of sendmsg, the current system call responsible for sending network messages in Linux. It is shown that this system call performance is not good enough, mainly when it needs to send a batch of similar data to many destinations in the network, as commonly experienced in IPTV servers. In order to prove that, a new system call has been implemented, sendmmsg, which acts similarly to the original one, but presenting some performance advantages, specially when sending similar data to peers. This new call needs only an extra parameter, when compared to the original one.