Pitfalls of InfiniBand with On-Demand Paging

InfiniBand is a popular high-performance interconnect and offers Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which enables low-latency communication based on kernel bypassing. Although the conventional RDMA technology necessitates manual physical memory management, an emerging extension, On-Demand Paging (ODP), implements automatic memory management based on RDMA-triggered page faults, which benefits productivity. Although the existing studies said the overhead of a page fault of ODP to be small enough, an in-depth investigation in various network situations including retransmission and timeout is missing. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the actual behaviors of ODP on different devices and reveal two awful performance pitfalls, which incur longer latencies 3–4 orders of magnitude than a common-case page fault does. We also experimentally demonstrate that the revealed pitfalls are harmful to existing software systems. This paper presents our experimental analysis and lessons learned therefrom.