Packet Capture in 10-Gigabit Ethernet Environments Using Contemporary Commodity Hardware

Abstract

Tracing traffic using commodity hardware in contemporary high- speed access or aggregation networks such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet is an increasingly common yet challenging task. In this paper we investigate if today’s commodity hardware and software is in principle able to capture traffic from a fully loaded Ethernet. We find that this is only possible for data rates up to 1 Gigabit/s without reverting to using special hardware due to, e. g., limitations with the current PC buses. Therefore, we propose a novel way for monitoring higher speed interfaces (e. g., 10-Gigabit) by distributing their traffic across a set of lower speed interfaces (e. g., 1-Gigabit).

This opens the next question: which system configuration is capable of monitoring one such 1-Gigabit/s interface? To answer this question we present a methodology for evaluating the performance impact of different system components including different CPU architectures and different operating system. Our results indicate that the combination of AMD Opteron with FreeBSD outperforms all others, independently of running in single- or multi-processor mode. Moreover, the impact of packet filtering, running multiple capturing applications, adding per packet analysis load, saving the captured packets to disk, and using 64-bit OSes is investigated.