Roadrunner: Accelerating Data Delivery to WebAssembly-Based Serverless Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Marcelino, Cynthia, Pusztai, Thomas, Nastic, Stefan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Marcelino, Cynthia
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
author_facet Marcelino, Cynthia
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
contents Serverless computing provides infrastructure management and elastic auto-scaling, therefore reducing operational overhead. By design serverless functions are stateless, which means they typically leverage external remote services to store and exchange data. Transferring data over a network typically involves serialization and deserialization. These operations usually require multiple data copies and transitions between user and kernel space, resulting in overhead from context switching and memory allocation, contributing significantly to increased latency and resource consumption. To address these issues, we present Roadrunner, a sidecar shim that enables near-zero copy and serialization-free data transfer between WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Roadrunner reduces the multiple copies between user space and kernel space by mapping the function memory and moving the data along a dedicated virtual data hose, bypassing the costly processes of serialization and deserialization. This approach reduces data movement overhead and context switching, achieving near-native latency performance for WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Our experimental results demonstrate that Roadrunner significantly improves the inter-function communication latency from 44% up to 89%, reducing the serialization overhead in 97% of data transfer, and increasing throughput by 69 times compared to state-of-the-art WebAssembly-based serverless functions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Roadrunner: Accelerating Data Delivery to WebAssembly-Based Serverless Functions
Marcelino, Cynthia
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Serverless computing provides infrastructure management and elastic auto-scaling, therefore reducing operational overhead. By design serverless functions are stateless, which means they typically leverage external remote services to store and exchange data. Transferring data over a network typically involves serialization and deserialization. These operations usually require multiple data copies and transitions between user and kernel space, resulting in overhead from context switching and memory allocation, contributing significantly to increased latency and resource consumption. To address these issues, we present Roadrunner, a sidecar shim that enables near-zero copy and serialization-free data transfer between WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Roadrunner reduces the multiple copies between user space and kernel space by mapping the function memory and moving the data along a dedicated virtual data hose, bypassing the costly processes of serialization and deserialization. This approach reduces data movement overhead and context switching, achieving near-native latency performance for WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Our experimental results demonstrate that Roadrunner significantly improves the inter-function communication latency from 44% up to 89%, reducing the serialization overhead in 97% of data transfer, and increasing throughput by 69 times compared to state-of-the-art WebAssembly-based serverless functions.
title Roadrunner: Accelerating Data Delivery to WebAssembly-Based Serverless Functions
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01888