Re: Packet capture performance comparison of

[Stephen Donnelly <stephen () endace com>]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 22:00 +0000, Jefferson Ogata wrote:
> 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?

Hopefully this won't be considered too commercial a response, but I
think it's worth replying to the list so that the response is available
as well as the question.

The DAG 4.5G4 card is a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet Network Measurement
Interface Card that is specifically designed to capture packets from
four GE interfaces at up to 100% line rate, regardless of the packet
size, e.g. up to 5,952,381 pps for 64-byte packets.

The capture process is DMA based and uses very little CPU time, so even
a single core is sufficient.

The drivers allow a large amount of host memory to be used for
buffering, but capture to disk performance is ultimately dependent on
the storage subsystem. Provided the average sustained disk write
performance is sufficient, 4Gbps can be captured to disk.

Endace also offers disk capture appliances which provide this level of
performance.

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any recent independent test publications.

Regards,
Stephen.
-- 
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    Stephen Donnelly BCMS PhD           email: sfd () endace com
    Endace Technology Ltd               phone: +64 7 839 0540
    Hamilton, New Zealand               cell:  +64 21 1104378
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