Packet capture performance comparison of quad-core Xeon vs Opteron

[Jefferson Ogata <Jefferson.Ogata () noaa gov>]

Greetings.

I've read Fabian Schneider's thesis "Performance evaluation of packet
capturing systems for high-speed networks", which compares capture
performance under variable testing and generally finds that dual-core
Opterons perform somewhat better under heavy capture load than dual-core
Xeons. But now that quad-core Xeons are available, I'm curious whether
anyone has measured capture improvement using four cores. I should
expect four cores to do better, but I'd be interested in any empirical
results to that effect. I'm wondering, for example, how close a box with
a couple of dual-port PCIe Gb NICs (Endace or nPulse) and dual quad-core
processors could come to 4Gb/s aggregate capture speed, while writing
some packets to disk. Has anyone out there put together such a box and
come up with some performance statistics?

-- 
Jefferson Ogata <Jefferson.Ogata () noaa gov>
NOAA Computer Incident Response Team (N-CIRT) <ncirt () noaa gov>
"Never try to retrieve anything from a bear."--National Park Service
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