On the Performance of Middleboxes Mark Allman ICSI Center for - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

on the performance of middleboxes
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On the Performance of Middleboxes Mark Allman ICSI Center for - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

On the Performance of Middleboxes Mark Allman ICSI Center for Internet Research mallman@icir.org (Work done while with BBN Technologies) Internet Measurement Conference October 2003 "Holly came from Miami, FLA; Hitch-hiked her way across


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On the Performance of Middleboxes

Mark Allman ICSI Center for Internet Research mallman@icir.org

(Work done while with BBN Technologies)

Internet Measurement Conference October 2003

"Holly came from Miami, FLA; Hitch-hiked her way across the USA"

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Middleboxes

"Middleboxes" have cropped up all over the Internet for a variety of reasons: security (firewalls, normalizers, etc.) performance (PEPs, TCP snoopers, etc.) address translation (NATs) Many have espoused the virtues and evilness of these entities. But, little quantitative information about their impact in real networks. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of one middlebox setup.

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Experimental Setup

Application measurements Packet tracing and matching is future work Measurement period: 10/14/2002 - 1/27/2003 Conducted in a production setting A network serving thousands of users

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Experimental Setup (cont.)

Measured: Transaction delay Feedback time (aka "RTT") Bulk transfer FTP performance See the paper Also, failures.

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Experimental Setup (cont.)

Dest LAN Internet Router LB1 LB2 FW1 FW2 MeasBox1 MeasBox2 Firewalls + Load Balancers = MBI

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Transaction Delay

How long does it take to start from nothing and run a transaction between a client and the server? Procedure: A finger transaction between the client and server Time the entire transaction at the application layer Conduct a transaction from each client roughly every 2 minutes. Over 75,000 transactions from each client.

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Transaction Delay (cont.)

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 CDF Response Time (sec) Outside Inside

42 failures inside the MBI; 12 failures outside the MBI

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Feedback Time

Once established, how long does it take to send a message across a TCP connection? Procedure: Open a TCP connection between the client and server Send "pings" from the client; echoed by the server Every (roughly) N seconds We only consider N = 30 seconds -- others are similar Until one of the pings does not come back in 20 seconds Then, start a new TCP connection and start over Over 303,000 pings from each client.

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Feedback Time (cont.)

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1e-05 0.0001 0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 100 CDF RTT (sec) R = 30 Outside Inside

Failed to setup connection: 51 from inside; 46 from outside

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Feedback Time (cont.)

Connection lengths are roughly twice as long from the outside as from the inside client On mean and median

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Bulk Transfer

Open a TCP connection Send 1 MB Last 4 bytes are a random number The server echos the random number back to the client Measurement stops when the "ACK" arrives Conduct a transfer from each client roughly every 10 minutes. 15,000 transfers from each client

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Bulk Transfer (cont.)

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 200000 400000 600000 800000 1e+06 1.2e+06 1.4e+06 CDF Throughput (bytes/sec) Outside Inside

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Bulk Transfer (cont.)

Why the bi-model distribution? Routing or provisioning changes

200000 400000 600000 800000 1e+06 1.2e+06 1.4e+06 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 16000 Throughput (bytes/sec) Transfer Number

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Bulk Transfer (cont.)

Why the difference in performance? Possibility #1: Concatenated TCP connections shorter control loop isolate drops Possibility#2: Maybe a difference in TCP’s congestion control algorithms inside and outside the MBI.

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Conclusions

Performance comparison is a muddle of contradictions Bulk transfer performance is enhanced by the middleboxes Transaction times increase roughly 5 times when going through the middleboxes Failures increase when going through the middleboxes But, failures are very low in all the cases (over 99.9% across all measurements).

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Future Work

Tons Lots of questions can be better answered if we had packet traces from various points throughout the middlebox infrastructure. Requires lots of analysis and correlation that may be non-trivial We can pin down why the performance is different E.g., are the MBI elements getting out of sync? E.g., are the firewalls dropping state? Etc. Gather data from more locations and different kinds of middleboxes

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