While the national high-performance network infrastructure has grown tremendously both in bandwidth and accessibility, it is still common for applications, hosts, researchers and other users to be unable to take full advantage of this new and improved infrastructure. Without expert attention from network engineers, users are unlikely to achieve even 10 Mbps single stream TCP transfers, despite the fact that the underlying network infrastructure can support data rates of 100Mbps or more. On unloaded networks, this poor performance can be attributed primarily to two factors: host system software (principally TCP) that is optimized for low bandwidth environments, and the lack of effective instrumentation and tools to diagnose performance issues.

The Web100 project was created to address these problems. The first is addressed with automatic TCP buffer tuning. The Web100 work in this area has been merged with main-line Linux kernel, and is contained in recent releases. To address the other problem, we have created a set of TCP instruments, defined in RFC 4898. Prototypes of these instruments were implemented in Linux with the Web100 kernel patch.

Note: Web100 is now several years beyond the end-of-funding. We are still updating the kernel patchs to track new Linux versions. A good portion of the user base and developers still monitor the discussion list. The only remaining support for the Web100 project is via the discussion list.

Software

The Web100 software implements instruments in the Linux TCP/IP stack. It is distributed in two pieces: a kernel patch adding the instruments, and a suite of "userland" libraries and tools for accessing the kernel instrumentation.

Current downloads quick links

• Kernel patch for Linux 2.6.27: web100-2.5.22-200810130047.tar.gz
• Userland suite: web100_userland-1.7.tar.gz

For older versions or more information, please visit the download page.

Documents

The documents area contains several papers and presentations about Web100, as well as a status page for the IETF extended statistics TCP MIB.

Support

Questions? Try out our FAQ and the READMEs included in the software distributions.

If you don't find an answer there, please join the Web100 discussion mailing list.

[ Please also note that due the incredible volume of spam we get, this has been turned into a closed list that can only be sent to by subscribers. Non-subscriber email to this list is automatically discarded. ]

News

Partnerships

Related projects

• Enabling High Performance Data Transfers
• High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP
• Dynamic Right Sizing
• Net100 [Defunct]
• Automatic TCP Window Tuning and Applications [Defunct]