CPU and Memory Optimization of Interprocess Communication Mechanism

Sammanfattning: Interprocess communication enables complex systems to be divided into separate processes. The division makes the systems more robust, scalable and increases system modularity. Interprocess communication mechanisms enable the processes to communicate and share services with other processes.  However, the efficiency of these mechanisms has a strong impact on the performance of such multi-process systems. Large interprocess communication overhead can become a bottleneck to overall system performance. Therefore, various efforts have been made to reduce IPC overhead to a level comparable to that of an ordinary function call. These efforts have been made on hardware level as well as software level. This thesis work focuses on software based improvements of an existing multi-process event driven system. The first step is aimed at improving memory utilization in the system by reducing interprocess communication where possible. The solution we propose preserves modularity as well as robustness of the system. The second step is aimed at improving IPC round trip times by experimenting with different IPC mechanisms and analyzing the obtained performance. Shared memory is used as the primary data sharing mechanism.