tcpdump mailing list archives

Re: advice for heavy traffic capturing


From: Motonori Shindo <mshindo () mshindo net>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 01:40:21 +0900 (JST)

All,

I do appreciate everybody who participated in such a meaningful
discussion so far. That was far more than I had expected initially
(well, I have to admit that my original question was somewhat vague to
be honest:-)). I will try to collect a hardware (NIC, bus, etc.) and
software (operating system, driver, packet filtering mechanism, etc.)
that seem to be considered most appropriate to get the best result,
based of suggestions appeared in this thread. If there's any new
finding, I'll come back here and share it with you all. Thanks!

Regards,

From: "Loris Degioanni" <loris () netgroup-serv polito it>
Subject: Re: [tcpdump-workers] advice for heavy traffic capturing
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 09:45:31 -0700

Hi,


In some email I received from Loris Degioanni, sie wrote:
Other things:
- modern network cards don't almost do buffering. The memory inside the
board is usually few KB, and its purpose is providing the space for a
packet
or two. The actual buffering is done in the RAM of the PC. What
determines
the card performance is PHY efficiency and PCI bandwidth usage.

Ok, so what do you have to say about NICs that have 128k buffers vs the
small buffers on other cards?


I don't have anything specific to say about them, since I've never used one.
I've worked with Intel cards: both Fast and Gigabit Ethernet ones have
descriptors and packet buffers in the RAM. The only reason why big buffers
inside the card can be useful is better PCI bus usage. But my experience is
that PCI limits are almost reached with 4-8K transfers.

Loris

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