Demystifying Performance of eBPF Network Applications

Recently, eBPF has emerged as the latest answer to how we should accelerate networked applications. In this paper we ask can all networked applications benefit from eBPF? We answer this question by running several benchmarks under different workloads and by designing different test cases. Our results show that in reality many networked applications cannot benefit from eBPF, and worse the use of eBPF can limit how applications are deployed (because eBPF can lead to performance isolation violations) and the workloads they can handle. We then discuss whether ongoing work can fix the limitations we identify, and propose directions that the community might want to focus on.