Performance Analysis of XDP-native, XDP-generic, and TC eBPF hooks - Vinay Kulkarni

eBay consistently ranks as the second-most visited e-commerce website after Amazon, which means ingesting a lot of network traffic. Hence, network performance, latency, and overhead are very important scaling metrics alongside network security.

While designing a new feature in Cilium for better network-level security, we did traffic ingress throughput and latency performance experiments in order to determine how the different eBPF hooks (XDP-native vs. XDP-generic vs. TC) compare.

In this session, Vinay will illustrate the use case, talk about related hooks to which eBPF programs can be attached on the network traffic receive path, and discuss the experiments performed and the outcomes. He will show how to use the eBPF profiler and FlameGraph tools to capture and analyze overhead in the network traffic receive path. He will conclude the talk with recommendations based on the findings from this experiment.