Fastclick improvement

[saftabrashid]

Hi,

I have been testing FastClick for a few days now and would like to know if projects such as PacketMill, RSS++, etc, which improve FastClick, are enabled by default when we build or test FastClick? I am running some basic latency and throughput experiments and would like to know how to enable/disable certain improvements, e.g., those that come from Packetmill, etc., when using FastClick.
I am following mostly the information available in the project Wiki, but there is not much available on this.

[tbarbette]

Hi @saftabrashid!

For the context, are you a PhD student somewhere?

First you might look at the options from ./configure --help

General high speed questions are there : https://github.com/tbarbette/fastclick/wiki/High-speed-I-O

For PacketMill you have the specific README : https://github.com/tbarbette/fastclick/blob/main/README.packetmill.md

Basically, nothing is included by default from PacketMill. The packetmill binary is built by default but it's up to you to use it. Then for the LLVM passes you need a bit more so it's compiled in. X-Change elements need a modified DPDK, that's not the easiest to start with.

If you use flow classification, you should use what comes from MiddleClick. It's all merged in but you have to use the right elements (everything in elements/flow and for the in-the-middle TCP, the things in elements/ctx. There are examples of configuration in the config folder).

There are many improvements, like elements that are more efficiently thread-safe, which are there by default. Most probably, if you take today's code and compare it with the 2015 one, it should be faster.

Then anyway, you can always send a perf report or a flamegraph here and we can discuss about specifics for a given problem.

[saftabrashid]

Thanks for the response. I am not a PhD student but a researcher currently working on a project related to software-defined routing, and I have been testing different relevant frameworks. Also, can you point me to some resources on the usage of different elements in click/fastclick? There are tons of elements, but there are very few example configurations on how to use them. I have been looking around, but it seems there is not much available except for the project wiki of the configs you mentioned.

[tbarbette]

Can you contact me by mail at [email protected] ? I can give you slides from lectures I gave before. I still have to mount a video tutorial at some point.

But there's no magic, the basic is to do a the tutorial, then look at small example and then look at the documentation for elements here : https://github.com/tbarbette/fastclick/wiki/Elements

If you want to go further, then you can read the documentation on Click's internals.