Profiling Multi-Level Operator Costs for Bottleneck Diagnosis in High-Speed Data Planes

Abstract: This paper proposes a saturation throughput delta-based methodology to precisely measure operator costs in high-speed data planes without intrusive instrumentation. The approach captures non-linear scaling, revealing that compute-intensive operators like CRC exhibit super-linear behavior, while most others are sub-linear. We introduce the Operator Performance Quadrant (OPQ) framework to classify operators by base and scaling costs, exposing a cross-architecture Quadrant Shift between Arm and x86. This method provides accurate, architecture-aware bottleneck diagnosis and a realistic basis for performance modeling and optimization.