Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Network utilization

["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Maier wrote:
> Could you tell me what kind of overhead your software would use on my
> network?  Is it the "leathel, bog down the network" or is it the "I
> don't add any bandwidth" to the network?  Thank you.

At least if you're

    1) capturing on an interface on the machine on which Ethereal is
running (rather than using some remote capture protocol, e.g. by
capturing from a named pipe on UN*X where the named pipe is being
written to by an ssh'ed tcpdump/Tethereal capture on another machine);

    2) not doing name resolution;

    3) not saving the capture to a file on a file server (or running
Ethereal or any shared libraries it uses from a file server);

the answer should be "doesn't add any bandwidth to the network while
capturing".  2) shouldn't require much bandwidth; 1) and the "saving the
capture" part of 3) might require significant bandwidth.