Re: Ethereal capabilities

Guy Harris <[email protected]> Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:41:37 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.network.ethereal.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Jul 19, 2006, at 5:26 PM, Bryant Keller wrote:

> Can Ethereal be overwhelmed by too many UDP packets on the network?

Yes, in the sense that the packets might be arriving too fast for it  
to read from the capture mechanism, filling up the queue of packets  
for it to read.  If that queue fills up, the capture mechanism will  
drop subsequent packets.  (That's just the capture mechanism dropping  
them; the networking stack won't drop packets from the main code path  
for packet input just because some capture mechanism drops them.)