F-Stack – A network development kit with high performance based on DPDK

It was considered innovative when it was first shared here eight years ago.

Anything more innovative happened since (honestly curious)?

I don't think so, but my guess is raw performance rarely matters in the real world.

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.

The goal of this kind of system is not to replace the application server. This is intended to work on the data plane where you do simple operations but do them many time per second. Think things like load balancers, cache server, routers, security appliances, etc. In this space Kernel Bypass is still very much the norm if you want to get an efficient system.

> In this space Kernel Bypass is still very much the norm if you want to get an efficient system.

Unless you can get an ASIC to do it, then the ASIC is massively preferrable; just the power savings generally¹ end the discussion. (= remove most routers from the list; also some security appliances and load balancers.)

¹ exceptions confirm the rule, i.e. small/boutique setups

ASICs require years to develop and aren’t flexible once deployed