Abstract

The Click modular router has been one of the most popular software router platforms for rapid prototyping and new protocol development. Unfor-tunately, its internal architecture has not caught up with recent hardware advancements, and the perfor-mance remains sub-optimal in high-speed networks despite its benefit of flexible module composition. In this work, we identify the performance bottle-necks of the existing Click router and extend it to scale with modern computer systems. Our improve-ments focus on both I/O and computation batching, and include various optimizations for multi-core systems and multi-queue network cards. We find that these techniques improve the performance by almost a factor of 10, and the maximum throughput reaches 28 Gbps of minimum-sized IPv4 packet forwarding speed on a single machine. 1