Like most components in the computing landscape, networking hardware has
grown steadily faster over time. Indeed, today's high-end network
interfaces can often move data more quickly than the systems they are
attached to can handle. The networking developers have been working for
years to increase the scalability of their subsystem; one of the current
projects is the
BIG TCP patch set from Eric Dumazet and Coco Li. BIG TCP isn't for
everybody, but it has the potential to significantly improve networking
performance in some settings.
