[Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 27 Feb 2004 5:02 pm, Kimker, Al wrote:
> Can you tell me what the minimum hardware requirements are for
> Ethereal, or is this really a function of the amount of traffic?
>
> I am running Ethereal on a Windows 2000 platform.

I use a P3 650, 640M RAM with no problems. But I don't have much 
traffic.

If I remember correctly, about six months ago someone reported that 
Win2k failed to capture all packets even on good hardware on a 10M 
ethernet with medium to high traffic. However Linux on the same 
hardware captured all traffic until it was high traffic on 100M 
ethernet.

If your requirements are for local traffic only, say for debugging a 
protocol or looking for virus activity, then hardware or O/S is 
probably not an issue, similarly if you can accept upto 10% packet 
loss. But if you are capturing packets on a well-utilised corporate 
network, and you cannot afford to drop any, then you need a fast 
processor with lots of memory and a good NIC, and you might want to 
consider a unix of some variety.

-- 
Richard Urwin