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Hard · Networking & Systems · Quant Trader interview question · networking, systems, latency, zero-copy
In a high-frequency trading environment, minimizing latency is paramount. Consider a scenario where your system receives market data packets via Ethernet. The traditional network I/O model involves the kernel copying data from the network interface card (NIC) buffer to a kernel buffer and then to the user-space application buffer. Zero-copy networking aims to eliminate one of these copies. Assuming the entire packet processing time is dominated by the memory copy operations, and a single memory