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Date:      Sat, 8 Aug 1998 16:02:17 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de (Andre Albsmeier)
Cc:        freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Does this impose a high load on a system?
Message-ID:  <199808081402.QAA16403@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <199808081532.RAA18920@internal> from "Andre Albsmeier" at Aug 8, 98 05:31:58 pm

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> Hello,
> 
> I am running a nice little program named arpwatch. It collects
> information about new machines being attached to a network.
> I do this because I can monitor if someone links a new
> machine to our nets.
> 
> For this operation, the network interface is put into promiscuous mode.
> IIRC, this means that all packets are passed to the kernel and maybe
> even all to the running program (arpwatch). I wonder if this causes
> a high load on the machine since I think it might have to process

it depends on how much data it copies from the packet up to user space.
To see if there is really a performance problem you should probably try
to flood the local network segment with a separate machine and see how
much load this causes.

If you are concerned about performance maybe you can hack the network
driver to grab the info you need, store in a table, and access them via
some separate interface.

(i am thinking of a similar approach in an attempt to implement bridging
in freebsd).

	cheers
	luigi
-----------------------------+--------------------------------------
Luigi Rizzo                  |  Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it    |  Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533           |  via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522           |  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
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