High-Speed Networking

The Windows High-Speed Networking (HSN) initiative is focused on the use of specialized networking hardware to eliminate system performance bottlenecks associated with network packet processing. By using HSN features, Windows administrators can cost-effectively scale their network-based applications while optimizing server performance and maximizing network throughput.

Network performance can be optimized by using stateful hardware offloads, stateless hardware offloads, and kernel bypass techniques.

Featured Content

• Networking Deployment Guide: Deploying High-speed Networking Features
  Provides a conceptual overview, deployment instructions, and monitoring information for high-speed networking features in Windows Server 2008, including TCP Chimney Offload, Receive-Side Scaling, virtual machine queue, and NetDMA. A downloadable version is also available.

Stateful Offloads

• TCP Chimney
  TCP Chimney reduces CPU utilization and increase network throughput for long-lived TCP connections with bulk transfers and applications that pre-post buffers. Moving TCP processing tasks to hardware frees up the server's CPU for other application tasks.

Stateless Offloads

• Receive-Side Scaling
  Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) resolves the single-processor bottleneck by allowing the receive side network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors.
• IPsec Task Offload
  IPsec Task Offload is a technology built into the Windows operating system that moves this workload from the main computer's CPU to a dedicated processor on the network adapter.