michaelhou/tssx

Transparently replace domain sockets with a fast shared memory channel

TSSX

TSSX stands for transparent shared-memory socket exchange and is a system-level C library that silently replaces domain socket communication with a custom shared memory data channel, promising performance improvements up to an order of magnitude.

Usage

One of the core goals of TSSX is to be incredibly easy and hassle-free to integrate into your system. We use the LD_PRELOAD trick to transparently overwrite system-call symbols with our own, using the dynamic linker. As such, if ./happy-banana-server and ./happy-banana-client are your executables using write/read, send/recv or similar system-calls to communicate over domains sockets, then the following lines will execute your application with TSSX:

$ LD_PRELOAD=$PWD/path/to/libtssx-server.so ./happy-banana-server
$ LD_PRELOAD=$PWD/path/to/libtssx-client.so ./happy-banana-client

where libtssx-server.so and libtssx-client.so are the result of compiling our library. And that is it! You don't have to recompile a single line, the dynamic linker does all the magic for you. We support the complete standard Berkeley Socket API, with light implementations of fcntl to the extent that is relevant to domain sockets.

Compiling

The project can be built using CMake on Linux and OS X:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Which will compile the TSSX library into the build/source/tssx path. We also provide example programs in the try/ folder, compiled into build/try, with appropriate run scripts (for convenience) in the scripts/ directory (run them from build/try).

Publication

We are working on a publication and will update this section accordingly in the near future.

Authors

TSSX is developed by Peter Goldsborough, Alexander van Renen and Viktor Leis at the Chair for Database Systems of Technical University of Munich (TUM).