Stateless CPU-aware datacenter load-balancing

Tom Barbette, Marco Chiesa, Gerald Q. Maguire Jr., Dejan Kostic

Abstract: Today, datacenter operators deploy Load-balancers (LBs) to efficiently utilize server resources, but must over-provision server resources (by up to 30%) because of load imbalances and the desire to bound tail service latency. We posit one of the reasons for these imbalances is the lack of per-core load statistics in existing LBs. As a first step, we designed CrossRSS, a CPU core-aware LB that dynamically assigns incoming connections to the least loaded cores in the server pool. CrossRSS leverages knowledge of the dispatching by each server's Network Interface Card (NIC) to specific cores to reduce imbalances by more than an order of magnitude compared to existing LBs in a proof-of-concept datacenter environment, processing 12% more packets with the same number of cores.