Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Slightly OT: Time precision

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From: "mail.ag" <mail.ag@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 09:51:58 -0400
Daniele Brevi wrote:
Hi at all,

I'm try to understand the precision of packets timestamp that I have
captured with ethereal.
Googling I undestand that this value doesn't depend by etheral but by
libpcap. But also this depend by timestamp added to packet by BPF. This
value (if I understand better) is read (in unix system) by gettimeofday().
So if all this it's true the precision of timestamp is the same of
gettimeofday() that should be 1 microsencond. This also because 'my' traffic
has not very high throughput and so my PC 'doesn't find difficult' capture
and timestamp packets.

It seems my reasoning is right?

Thanks in advance and sorry for english;-)

Daniele

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Granted there is a bit of marketing involved, but this paper seems to give a good overview of packet capture time stamping:
http://endace.com/library_Technical.htm

(these guys sell high performance cards)

HTH


Andrew