233results about How to "Eliminate bottlenecks" patented technology

A conditional access method and apparatus for use with a system for controlling of digital TV program start time. Subscriber access is authorized to digital program streams. Content are divided into a plurality of working periods. Each working period of the plurality of working periods is scrambled with a different working key. A working key of a given period is delivered ahead of the given period. The working key is synchronized with scrambling control bits in an header working keys are inserted into an entitlement control message (ECM) packet, and the ECM packet is encrypted using a service key. A time period is inserted into the ECM packet during which the service key is valid. A service key is inserted in an entitlement.

Roughly described, a packet switching fabric contains a separate queue scheduler for each combination of an input module and a fabric output port. The schedulers may also be specific to a single class of service. Each queue scheduler schedules its packets without regard to state of other input queues and without regard to packets destined for other output ports. In an aspect, the fabric manages per-flow bandwidth utilization of output port bandwidth capacity by monitoring the same and asserting backpressure toward the queue scheduler for any thread that is exceeding its bandwidth allocation. In another aspect, a switching fabric uses leaky buckets to apply backpressure in response to overutilization of downstream port capacity by particular subflows. In another aspect, a switching fabric includes a cascaded backpressure scheme.

The invention proposes a network device driver architecture with functionality distributed between kernel space and user space. The overall network device driver comprises a kernel-space device driver (10) and user-space device driver functionality (20). The kernel-space device driver (10) is adapted for enabling access to the user -space device driver functionality (20) via a kernel-space-user-space interface (15). The user-space device driver functionality (20) is adapted for enabling direct access between user space and the NIC (30) via a user-space-NIC interface (25), and also adapted for interconnecting the kernel-space-user-space interface (15) and the user-space-NIC interface (25) to provide integrated kernel -space access and user-space access to the NIC (30). The user-space device driver functionality (20) provides direct, zero-copy user-space access to the NIC, whereas information to be transferred between kernel space and the NIC will be “tunneled” through user space by combined use of the kernel-space device driver (10), the user-space device driver functionality (20) and the two associated interfaces (15,25).

An e-mail system is described that includes a mass-mail accelerator (MMA), which is particularly suited for processing mass e-mailings. Instead of being posted to a message transfer agent (MTA), outgoing messages are instead passed to the MMA for carrying out highly parallel e-mail delivery / routing. The MMA employs a plurality of queues, which may either be general or specific. A specific queue is configured to handle only e-mail destined for a particular domain, such as the AOL.com domain; a general queue is configured to handle all other e-mail. Each queue manages a pool of MTA threads. During MMA operation, once a message has been passed to a queue, that queue examines its MTA threads to see if one is ready to accept the message. If an MTA thread is ready, the queue will assign the message to that MTA. The MTA thread proceeds to handle the work of the SMTP exchange between the MMA and the target real-world MTA (e.g., an AOL MTA). While a given MTA thread is waiting for a reply from the real-world (destination) MTA (e.g., the AOL MTA), the MMA can proceed to do other work. In this manner, the bottleneck usually encountered with processing mass e-mailings is removed.