Most business oriented networked applications use the Berkeley Sockets API to communicate with other applications or server processes. The socket API enables programmers to establish reliable connections to applications running on servers on the other side of the world - using the Internet, to applications running on other servers in the data room – using a local LAN or a high speed interconnect solution such as Dolphin Express or to applications running on other CPUs in the same server. Socket communication within servers are established through the special loopback device or through the use of its own host IP address / hostname or local address (typical 127.0.0.1 / localhost).
Local socket communication within the server is normally a software only solution implemented by the operating system networking software stack and avoids the use of Ethernet cards. Local socket communication is faster than communicating to remote servers, typical 1 byte ping pong half latency on fast servers is in the range of 9 us or higher.
Newer supersockets software from Dolphin has been enabled to also support local socket communication, reducing the local loopback cost from 9 us to 1.5 us. Measurements shows that the large message throughput increases up to 6 times. The accelerated loopback solution is automatically enabled when the Dolphin Express solution is installed.
Significant MySQL speedup has been reported both for single instance MySQL and for MySQL Cluster.
The optimized loopback solution is enabled both for Dolphin Express DX and Dolphin Express D/SCI. Customers that only want to accelerate loopback sockets only need to install one single DX or SCI card with a loopback cable.