I’ve worked with socket programming on and off (mostly on) for a good ten years. Although this doesn’t make me an expert, by far, this has given me good insight into what seems to work and what doesn’t. This will most likely be a multi-part piece as sockets are a complicated beast. What I will be talking about is a very low level understanding of how sockets work and what each of the seven layers of the OSI model mean to you. Hopefully you will have such a level of understanding of sockets and protocols that you will grok them. Only when you reach this level can you understand how to max out performance.

As with many of my other posts, we’re really here to talk about maximizing performance. The world has changed with the advancement of multicore processors and cloud computing. As we move into distributing our work among multiple processors and machines, these separate processes will need to communicate. The IP protocol is now ubiquitous due to the internet’s popularity. It continues growing as processes are moved to the cloud and APIs are moved to RESTful sites.

So the Open Systems Interconnection model or OSI model defines the basis of most networking systems. This includes the full stack that runs the internet from HTTP down to the 802.3 standard (ethernet cable). I’ll briefly define each of the seven layers and how they map to the web. Each layer of the stack adds its own unique wrapper upon the packet it receives from above. In other words, the layers don’t care about each other. They just know they need to add some data to the packet as it goes down the layers, and reads from the packet as it goes back up on the other side.

Layer 1 – Physical Layer

This is the one that’s probably the easiest to understand. This is the standard of actually sending bits down the wire. This includes your standard ethernet and wireless standards. This defines not only the signals and voltages, but also the physical connectors and wires. There’s not much for efficiency that we can do on this layer since it’s physical hardware and doesn’t allow for software modifications.

Layer 2 – Data Link Layer

The data link layer defines the protocol of talking between two machines that are physically connected. 802.3 extends into this layer describing what each byte means. This is also where your MAC address comes into play… you know, that long hex string written on your network card. Again, this is usually physical hardware, so not much we can do. If you have an “ethernet” card, it will probably only speak ethernet. Flow control and error checking are done here too.

Layer 3 – Network layer

Okay, this is where code starts getting thrown in, although mostly in firmware. You may know this layer as the IP layer in protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP. The network layer defines how packets are routed from computer to computer. This is mainly how far up routers and hubs go when it comes to analyzing packets. They read up to layer 3, then decide the optimal path this packet should travel.

Layer 4 – Transport Layer

This is the basis of how one computer “sees” the other, even though they are not directly connected. This is where TCP and UDP live. Decisions on how you use this layer can affect your throughput and data quality. This is probably the most important layer to grok to improve your throughput. TCP is your connection oriented protocol, where the two PCs communicate as if they were next to each other. UDP is the same, except the connection state is not shared and the data may come randomly.

Layer 5 – Session Layer

Layer 5 isn’t all that important in the TCP/IP world. It defines things such as VPNs and broadcasting methods. This is only useful if you are building something custom. Otherwise, you would normally just use an off the shelf component for this. Ignore it for now.

Layer 6 – Presentation Layer

This is where things become a little grey. The presentation layer defines how the packets work together as a whole. That means if you’re sending a file over TCP/IP, while it may break up into packets, this layer will use them all as a whole. This is straight code. It is normally the code that handles the raw packets and converts them to useful information in your software. Security is also added at this layer, so things like SSL live here.

Layer 7 – Application Layer

This is the bread and butter. This is what the user actually uses and sees on the screen. After the packets are pieced together in layer 6, your application must use that information. This part of the application is usually run on the UI thread, and normally does not interact with sockets directly.

In future posts, I will go into more detail about each one of the configurable layers and describe steps that you can do to increase throughput.