How can I make tcpreplay run faster?
Profiling tcpreplay has shown that a significant amount of time is spent writing packets to the network. Hence, your OS kernel implimentation of writing to raw sockets is one of the most important aspects since that is where tcpreplay spends most of it’s time. In no particular order: • Hardware: • Use a fast enough hardware. tcpreplay is very dependant on disk I/O, your network card and CPU. • When selecting disk drives for storing pcap files, choose drives with higher RPM over lower seek times or larger caches. • SCSI disks with a good controller should provide the best performance, since they generally require the CPU to do less work. • For best performance, consider some sort of striping RAID (like level 0 or 5) to increase read throughput performance. • Don’t store pcap files on a remote server (NFS or SMB mounted). That just increases latency and CPU utilization. Directly attached storage like SCSI or FibreChannel is fine. • Since tcpreplay is not multi-threaded, SMP or dual-core
