[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Srivathsan_Srinivasagopalan wrote:

>             Does tcpdump occasionally not register a tcp segment (under 
> heavy traffic)?

If by "register" you mean "successfully capture and receive", yes, it's 
possible that, if the traffic on the network is heavy enough, tcpdump 
(or Ethereal, or Tethereal, or Analyzer, or snoop, or, I suspect, most 
commercial network analyzers) could fail to capture and save all packets 
that the user wants.

A capture filter specifying which packets are of interest would help 
here, as it would reduce the amount of CPU time and disk bandwidth used 
to save the packets to disk.  (Note, of course, that you need to have 
enough *file system* bandwidth available, if you're saving the traffic 
to a file in a file system; a file system usually can't use all the 
disk's bandwidth, as the file might not be in a single contiguous chunk 
on the disk, and the file system has its own "overhead" metadata that 
gets updated as well.)