Performance evaluation of packet capturing systems for high-speed networks

摘要

Using commodity systems for capturing packets in a Gigabit environments is a challenging task. This applies especially to a full capture of packet headers along with their data. Today's commodity PC systems come in different flavors in terms of processor hardware as well as in terms of operating systems. In this paper we describe a methodology for evaluating different systems with respect to their maximum capture rate and present our preliminary results of comparing Intel Xeon against AMD Opteron based systems running either Linux or FreeBSD.