Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] tethereal performance questions

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From: "Jacobs, Michael" <Michael.Jacobs@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:09:59 -0500

I am using tethereal to capture SIP and RTP traffic to a Session Border Controller. I have

two Fedora Core 2 machines I use to perform captures. Both are dual Xeon 2.6 Mhz, with

2 Ethernet interfaces (Gigabit) and are connected to a 3750 Cisco Switch.

 

When running at approximately 40 MB and capturing 500,000 packets I see where there is

a large amount of packets dropped from either machine:

 

[root@wigeon mjacobs]# tethereal -i eth1 -q -c 500000 -w junk.eth

Capturing on eth1

184279 packets dropped

500000 packets captured

 

The CPU is running approximately 20% and I do not show memory swapping or high i/o wait.

 

Below is the version of tethereal I have installed (from source):

 

 tethereal -v

tethereal 0.10.6

Compiled with GLib 2.4.0, with libpcap 0.8.3, with libz 1.2.1.1,

with libpcre 5.0, without UCD-SNMP or Net-SNMP, without ADNS.

Running with libpcap version 0.8.3 on Linux 2.6.8-1.521smp.

 

Should I expect better performance than this? If so, could someone point me in a direction

to go to tweak my machines. Searched boards I found some notes a couple of years

ago talking about changes to the linux kernel and some patches, but nothing specific.  I have

never dealt with any of that before, but since I work in a test lab, trying out these types

of things is not a problem and how I learn.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike