Quant Interview Practice Questions

A high-frequency trading firm is evaluating the performance of their network stack. They are comparing standard socket I/O to a DPDK-accelerated approach. Assume that for standard socket I/O, the kernel processing overhead (context switching, system calls, memory copies) adds a fixed latency of 5 microseconds per packet. DPDK, by bypassing the kernel, reduces this overhead to 0.5 microseconds per packet. However, DPDK introduces a polling mechanism on the NIC, which, in a lightly loaded scenario