Packing messages as a tool for boosting the performance of total ordering protocols

Abstract

This paper compares the throughput and latency of four protocols that provide total ordering. Two of these protocols are measured with and without message packing. We used a technique that buffers application messages for a short period of time before sending them, so more messages are packed together. The main conclusion of this comparison is that message packing influences the performance of total ordering protocols under high load overwhelmingly more than any other optimization that was checked in this paper, both in terms of throughput and latency. This improved performance is attributed to the fact that packing messages reduces the header overhead for messages, the contention on the network, and the load on the receiving CPUs.