On Sun, Jun 11, 2000 at 03:18:24PM +0930, David Lloyd wrote:
> Is it just me? I would have thought that running something like Ethereal
> would downgrade one's Internet services in terms of perceived speed
> considerably...
Well:
1) you have a fairly powerful machine;
2) you're on a slow network connection (I'm assuming that either
the machine's only network connection is the modem
connection, or that Ethereal is listening on the modem line
and not, say, any Ethernet interfaces);
3) that connection isn't a broadcast network (again, I'm
assuming you're listening to the modem line), so the only
traffic Ethereal sees is traffic from or to the machine, not
any traffic between other machines;
so I'm not surprised that Ethereal isn't imposing a performance hit.
I suspect that, much of the time, your CPU is enough less than 100% busy
that, even when Ethereal is running, you have CPU left; try running some
CPU-monitoring application ("vmstat", perhaps, or some GUI application
to show CPU load) - I suspect that, even with Ethereal running, there's
CPU left over.
Then run something to monitor the rate of network traffic; I suspect
that's relatively low as well.
If, however, you were to run Ethereal on, say, a 233 MHz Pentium
machine, listening to a busy 100Mb Ethernet, that may slow down the
machine significantly.
