Network Algorithmics by Varghese

I skimmed Network Algorithmics by George Varghese (2005). This book presents common tricks used at the OS, hardware, and architecture levels to prevent network bottlenecks. Here are 15 principles listed on the first page.

Number	Principle	Example
1	Avoid obvious waste	Zero-copy interfaces
2	Shift computation in time
2a	Precompute	Application device channels
2b	Evaluate lazily	Copy-on-write
2c	Share expenses, batch	Integrated layer processing
3	Relax system requirements
3a	Trade certainty for time	Stochastic fair queuing
3b	Trade accuracy for time	Switch load balancing
3c	Shift computation in space	IPv6 fragmentation
4	Leverage off system components
4a	Exploit locality	Locality-driven receiver
4b	Trade memory for speed	Processing, Lulea IP lookups
4c	Exploit existing hardware	Fast TCP checksum
5	Add hardware
5a	Use memory interleaving and pipelining	Pipelined IP lookups
5b	Use wide word parallelism	Shared memory switches
5c	Combine DRAM and SRAM effectively	Maintaining counters
6	Create efficient specialized routines	UDP checksums
7	Avoid unnecessary generality	Fbufs
8	Do not be tied to reference implementation	Upcalls
9	Pass hints in layer interfaces	Packet filters
10	Pass hints in protocol headers	Tag switching
11	Optimize the expected case	Header prediction
11a	Use caches	Fbufs
12	Add state for speed	Active virtual circuit list
12a	Compute incrementally	Recomputing CRCs
13	Optimize degrees of freedom	IP trie lookups
14	Use bucket sorting, bitmaps	Timing wheels
15	Create efficient data structures	Level-4 switching