Re: Best OS / Distribution for gigabit capture?

[Rick Jones <rick.jones2 () hp com>]

Fabian Schneider wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Regarding the OS we have done testing on this some five years ago. Back then
> we found that FreeBSD performed better than Linux. Yet there have been
> improvements proposed for both Linux (memory mapping, and Luca Deri's work)
> and FreeBSD ("zero-copy BPF and Alexandre Fiveg's work). To get details just
> google all this.
>
> Yet, experience from operating a large scale packet capturing systems shows
> that the biggest challenge usually is to have a disk system that is fast
> enough to write the stream of packets to disk. You might want to check this
> first. (e.g. you can run a Bonnie++ to see how fast your disk system is.)

And be certain to beat on the filesystem/disc with I/Os of the size that will be 
coming from your packet capturing...

rick jones
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