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Has anyone done any serious performance testing of Ethereal/libpcap/tcpdump as 
regards network capture performance?

I'm curious if there have been any studies done as to how well the capture lib 
holds up under various network load conditions on various platforms - 
particularly while saving to disk.

For example, with a reasonably powerful system (let's say a Dual-Athlon MP 1800 
system with a couple of gig of Dual-DDR RAM, and a fairly fast striped RAID 
array that should handle 80MB/s) running Linux, what is the maximum data rate I 
should expect to be able to capture?  At what rate do I begin to drop packets 
(and therefore at what rate should I expect packets to be saved reliably)?

I'm trying to decide whether it'd be feasable to build an open source/free 
software-based capture device.  I rarely need to capture rates larger than 
350Mbit/s, but I have yet to find a single commercial (all Windows-based, of 
course) package that can come close to keeping up with this rate _while saving 
to disk_.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Ian