How fast is 127.0.0.1?

Question

I wonder it it is tied to my NIC at all or if the OS or driver intercepts and immediately returns data sent to the loopback address?

Do the electrons actually travel to my NIC then the NIC returns them?

Answer 1

You don't mention a particular OS but for most all that happens is that the data travels down the stack until it gets to IP at which point it's pretty much sent back. That's a massive oversimplification but means that the entire process is usually CPU bound so its performance is therefore directly linked to CPU speed plus stack efficiency. In practical terms modern CPUs and OSs should be able to 'bounce' loopback traffic considerably faster than 40Gbps - which is the fastest NIC I think I'm capable of buying today. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

No all 127.0.0.1 traffic never hits the physical network, it gets processed by a loop back adapter in the kernel.

Answer 3

It depends on what OS you're running, but Windows 2000 had a bug in it where requests on the loopback adaptor would be slow. There's some useless trivia for you!

Please see this kb article for more information.

Answer 4

You may be interested in the Loopback Fast Path feature we added in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. I've written a short blog about it here

http://blogs.technet.com/b/wincat/archive/2012/12/05/fast-tcp-loopback-performance-and-low-latency-with-windows-server-2012-tcp-loopback-fast-path.aspx

It also provides an illustration of the path taken by the loopback with and without the optimization

With Best Regards

Ed Briggs Microsoft Corporation

Answer 5

I'd rather say that you find your answer in it's name itself. The name says: "Local Loopback Address", which in itself means that the network never intervenes in the process and the request is in itself looped back locally.

Answer 6

127.0.0.1 is no faster any other local ip. The local ip fast, because it doesn't use physical device and 2-layers.( It never hits your NIC)

iperf -c 109.191.109.xxx 1111 -t 5
iperf: ignoring extra argument -- 1111
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 109.191.109.241, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 49.7 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 109.191.109.xxx port 32840 connected with 109.191.109.xxx port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  4.72 GBytes  8.12 Gbits/sec

$ iperf -c 127.0.0.1 1111 -t 5
iperf: ignoring extra argument -- 1111
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 127.0.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 49.7 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 127.0.0.1 port 56482 connected with 127.0.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  4.62 GBytes  7.94 Gbits/sec

Answer 7

If you are on Linux...

type in "ifconfig -a" as root...

Notice the "interrupt" line on all NICs...notice there is no "interrupt" line on "lo"...that means it does not even have an interrupt assigned to it, so pretty darn fast ;-)