Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 31 Mar 2004 01:32:02 -0700
From:      "Chance Whaley" <chance@dreamscope.com>
To:        "'Wes Peters'" <wes@softweyr.com>, "'Steven Stremciuc'" <steve@freeslacker.net>, <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Looking for switch recommendations ...
Message-ID:  <20040331083141.948604CA35@caliban.dreamscope.com>
In-Reply-To: <200403301406.05470.wes@softweyr.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-net@freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-net@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Wes Peters
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 3:06 PM
> To: Steven Stremciuc; freebsd-net@freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Looking for switch recommendations ...
> 
> 
> Every switch that does port mirroring probably has some 
> problems related to port mirroring, because mirroring 
> typically cannot be done in hardware.  If nothing else, you 
> can expect some degraded performance on the port(s) being 
> mirrored and on the port doing the mirroring, because the 
> packets have to be fondled by the CPU before they can be 
> switched.  Even with a really fast processor, this will 
> increase the latency a bit.

This is an untrue statement. There are several switch vendors that pride
themselves on their wire-speed mirroring capabilities - specifically their
ability to do it in hardware. Foundry's BigIron and the like comes to mind
as a highly reliable and fairly inexpensive (subjective) switch that is very
capable of doing multi-port wirespeed mirroring at line rate. 

.chance




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040331083141.948604CA35>