Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Specs for monitoring full 100 Mb line

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From: Ian Schorr <spamcontrol2@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 20:01:29 -0500
I have to admit that in the lab I've found that Ethereal/tethereal dropped between .01 and .3% of all frames for me at rates of greater than about 10MB/s (so 80mbit/s) - which, strangely, was consistent all the way up to 40 or so MB/s, for tests lasting up to 100gigabytes of data.

However, all of my performance testing so far has been in Windows while saving to disk - I'd imagine that I'd see fewer drops (none?) if I were simply buffering the data in RAM.

Of course, Ethereal goes into spasms if I start wrapping files - I tend to start seeing 50% packet loss or so once I started to wrap. Smaller file sizes seemed to actually make the problem worse, and I saw this at rates as low as 20MB/s. Has anyone else had any experience with this?

How were you capturing? To RAM or outputting to a file? If capturing to RAM, how much free RAM did you have at the time? If the system had to start paging to disk, it may explain (at least some) of your drops...

Ian

Alistair.McGlinchy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Ronnie,

Can you provide a benchmark for your system?  What's its spec and how many
Mbit/s can you capture to file with less than say 1 in a million packets
being lost?

FWIW I just XCopyed 500MB of data from my PC (1.5Ghz Xeon WinXP with Intel
Pro/100S) to a similar one. Data transfer rate was 50-60Mbit/s throughout
and tethereal was running at 60-70% of CPU. I lost 0.5% of the packets.

Alistair

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