It was considered innovative when it was first shared here eight years ago.
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I once explored this, hitting around 125K RPS per core on Node.js. Then I realized it was pointless, the moment you add any real work (database calls, file I/O, etc.), throughput drops below 10K RPS.
Zero copy is the important part for applications that need to saturate the NIC. For example Netflix integrated encryption into the FreeBSD kernel so they could use sendfile for zero-copy transfers from SSD (in the case of very popular titles) to a TLS stream. Otherwise they would have had two extra copies of every block of video just to encrypt it.
Note however that their actual streaming stack is very different from the application stack. The constraint isn't strictly technical: ISP colocation space is expensive, so they need to have the most juiced machines they can possibly fit in the rack to control costs.
There's an obvious appeal to accomplishing zero-copy by pushing network functionality into user space instead of application functionality into kernel space, so the DPDK evolution is natural.
AF_XDP is also another way to do high-performance networking in the kernel, and it's not bad.
DPDK still has a ~30% advantage over an optimized kernel-space application with a huge maintenance burden. A lot of people reach for it, though, without optimizing kernel interfaces first.